The Equinox (Volume I, Number V)

THE ORDEAL OF IDA PENDRAGON 701,], ANDK I THE RED HOUR THERE was myrrh in the honey of the smile with which Edgar Rolles turned from the faeade of the Pantheon. “Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante"—he reflected that the grateful fatherland never gives her great men anything but a tomb. Then the full blast of it struck him. The Gargantuan jest! The solemn ass that had devised the motto; the laborious ass that had put it up there; the admiring asses that had warmed their skinny souls at the false fire of its pompous sentimentality. Perhaps he was the first to see the joke! He rocked and reeled with laughter—to find himself caught, as he stumbled against a table; in the sturdy arms of a solidly built young woman, who—he had in her a glance—joined in Celtic harmony the robust brutality of the peasant to the decadent refinement of the latter Greek. The face of a Bacchanal, even of a satyr, perhaps; but a satyr of Raphael; the face of a madonna, perhaps; but a madonna of Rodin. Besides this, 115