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All around her God had been dealing all that day with Lady Boyd's neighbours as well as with her, only they had not observed it. But she had not only an eye to see but a mind and a heart to observe also. She had a heart that, like the fabled Philosopher's Stone, turned all it touched and all that touched it immediately to fine gold.
Though little of a theologian, he appreciated intuitively some metaphysical ideas; he projected into politics the philosopher's distinction between sin and the sinner. For all his hatred of the ideas which he held to be treason, he never had a vindictive impulse directed toward the men who accepted those ideas. Destruction for the idea, infinite clemency for the person such was his attitude.
The Dominican writers deny that he ever sought the philosopher's stone, but his treatise upon minerals sufficiently proves that he did. Artephius, a name noted in the annals of alchymy, was born in the early part of the twelfth century. He wrote two famous treatises; the one upon the philosopher's stone, and the other on the art of prolonging human life.
Vigorous, life-like portraits, poetic and historic groups, occasionally grew upon his easel; but there were many hours yes, days when absorbed in study among galvanic batteries and mysterious lines of wires, he seemed to us like an alchemist of the middle ages in search of the philosopher's stone.
He had a furnace, in a little building separate from his house, where he kept a fire for forty years, till he was more than eighty, visiting it every night, of summer and winter alike, to be sure of keeping it alive; and melting down, as his family said, many a good guinea, and all to find the philosopher's stone, the mysterious metal that should turn all to gold.
Wise men in their cells, before Athens was built, before the Pyramids were conceived, were thinking out this matter in strange parts of Egypt, in forgotten parts of Syria and Asia. For generations their dream has been looked upon as a thing elusive as the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of metals any of these unsolved problems.
Goddess that she is by dower of her eternal beauty, she is a true woman by her tact knows the charm of being seldom seen, of coming by surprise and staying but a little while; never wears the same dress two nights running, nor all night the same way; commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulness, and makes her uselessness adored by poets, artists, and all lovers in all lands; lends herself to every symbolism and to every emblem; is Diana's bow and Venus's mirror and Mary's throne; is a sickle, a scarf, an eyebrow, his face or her face, and look'd at by her or by him; is the madman's hell, the poet's heaven, the baby's toy, the philosopher's study; and while her admirers follow her footsteps, and hang on her lovely looks, she knows how to keep her woman's secret her other side unguess'd and unguessable.
Caracalla ended his vehement speech with a jeering laugh, and looked round eagerly for applause from the "friends" for whose benefit his last words had been spoken; and it was offered so energetically as to drown the philosopher's reply.
Christopher hesitated a moment; but the mute invitation, so arch yet timid, so pretty, tender, sly, and womanly, was too much for him, as it has generally proved for males, and the philosopher's foot was soon in the very place to which the Simpleton with the mere tail of her eye directed it.
There doesn't seem to be." "Come along stand up to it like a man. It's up to you to-night. She can't carry you off bodily." "I'm not so sure of that." The Philosopher's tone was grim. So far I had been transfixed. But now I hurried away. I was consumed with anxiety during the next ten minutes, lest they come to blows in settling it.
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