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It was very early morning and a slight mist, an opaline mist as in Bessborough Gardens only without the fiery flicks on roof and chimney-pot from the rays of the red London sun, promised to turn presently into a woolly fog. Barring a small dug-out canoe on the river there was nothing moving within sight. I had just come up yawning from my cabin.
She sat up in her bed, with her large, blue, distended eyes fixed on mine, turning paler and paler, brighter and brighter, as she gazed, until their lustre seemed opaline rather than spiritual, and with her slender white hands wreathed together like the interlacing marble snakes in the grasp of the Laocoon, so long, and lithe, and sinuous, seemed the polished, flexile fingers.
The girl, meanwhile, stood motionless, in a half-expectant attitude, and, seeing her there, some of the doves on the roof flew down and strutted on the ground before her, coo-cooing proudly, as though desirous of attracting her attention. One of them boldly perched on the window-sill; she glanced at the bird musingly, and softly stroked its opaline wings and shining head without terrifying it.
I soon became thoroughly absorbed, and forgot that there were any persons present. In fancy I imagined myself again in view of the glory of the Electric Ring again I seemed to behold the opaline radiance of the Central Sphere: "Where Love's a grown-up God, Where the Houri glances are Imbued with all the beauty Which we worship in a star."
As evening closes in, the fascination of the scene deepens; spire and roofs, shadowy hill and stern mountain fastness, are all outlined in pale, silvery tones against a pure pink and opaline sky, the greenery of near vine and peach-tree all standing out in bold relief, blotches of greenish gold upon a dark ground.
Again an angel-wing swept its way among the clouds, and folds of opaline glow pavilioned the entrance into cerulean heights, and a solemn voice uttered these words out of the great All-Where around me: "I am the Lord thy God. I will show thee the way wherein I would have thee to walk. Rest thy soul in my love, and it shall satisfy thee." With heart and soul and voice, my all of being cried out.
She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her, she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its curve something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo's, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the imagination into regions of fabulous delight.
Before they had gone far on their homeward ride, all things passed through magical changes. The hills were seen in vapory visions, shifting their hues with opaline glances; and over the green, billowy surface of the broad Campagna was settling a prismatic robe of mist, changing from rose to violet.
Placed in an emerald world with a hither edge of opaline shadow and a fine spray of diamond-dust to set it sparkling; with ten million singing birds to form its orchestra; sunset clouds and sunrise mists to drape it, and countless flowers to make it sweet while the hand of God himself upholds it on its way among the clustering stars, what right has a man to find fault with his surroundings, or lament himself that all things do not go to suit him here below?
They call the stuff by different names Blanc Rosati, Crême de l'Imperatrice, Milk of Beauty, Perline, Opaline, Ivorine but it means bismuth all the same. Expose your fashionable beauty to the fumes of sewer-gas, and that dazzling whiteness would turn to a dull brown hue, or even black. Thank heaven, my Lesbia wears real lilies and roses. Have you been here long? 'About half an hour'
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