Free A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 by E. R. Eddison

and with a shake of her shoulders, let the soft garment fall open and down about her hips. 'Carry you off to-night.' It really was a bit much. The extraordinary coolness of it all, after that dreadful scene they had had at the end of April, when he had turned up five months before his time, and she had said—well, said enough to end it for most men, one would think. And yet now, this morning, after six weeks of obedient absence and silence—. She had ridden to hounds often enough; but to be hunted like a hare! True, she had started the thing, in a way, by turning to ride off in the other direction as soon as she saw him. But still. Her bosom rose and fell with the memory of it: as if all the wide universe had suddenly run hunting-mad, and she the quarry: she and poor little Tessa with her flying feet: an excitement like darkness with sudden rollings in it like distant drums; and the trees, the solid ground, the waking buttercups and meadowsweet with the dew on them, the peggy-whitethroat on the thorn, the brier-rose at the edge of the wood, larks trilling invisible in the blue, the very upland newness of the summer air of this birthday morning, all had seemed as if caught up into that frenzy of flight to join in the hunt, multiplying the galloping music of Lessingham's horse-hooves, now loud, now dim, now loud again, to a hue and cry and a gallop of all these things. And then the coolness of him, after this wild horse-race: the astounding assurance of this proposition, put to her so easily and as if it were the simplest thing in the world: and his having a motorcar, so that they shouldn't be caught. Most monstrous of all, about the luggage: that he had luggage for her as well, every possible thing she could want, every kind of clothes.
    How did he know? Mary laid down her brush and leaned back, staring into her own eyes for a minute in the looking-glass. Then, after a minute, some comical matter stirred in her eyes' inward corners. 'How did you know?' she said, addressing not her own image but the mirrored door over its shoulder, as if somone had come in there and stood in the doorway. Then, with eyes resting on herself again, she said suddenly in herself: 'This is how I should—. If we were to be—If we are to be— But no. my friend. Not to be swept up like—like a bunch of candles.'
    She and her looking-glass self surveyed one another for a while, coolly, in detail, not looking any more into each other's eyes nor over each other's shoulders to the door beyond. At length the looking-glass image said, not audibly, but to Mary's inward ear: I suppose a man sees it differently. I think I understand, partly, how he might see it: something very delicate, easily hurt, easily broken, but so g entle that you couldn't bear to - Like a field-mouse or some such: or like a baby. No, for what matters about a baby is what it is going to be; but this,—here it is, full-fledged: what it is and what it ought to be, in one: doesn't want to change: just to be. That is enough for anybody. And its power, what all power ought to be: not to overpower the weak, but overpower the powerful. Really it hasn't any power: except that it need only lift a finger, and every power there is or ever could be must rise to protect it.
    But that isn't true, (said the looking-glass image, going over with musing untroubled eyes the thing before it: chin, throat: gleam of a shoulder betwixt fallen masses of flame-coloured hair: arms whose curves had the motion of swans in them and the swan's whiteness: breasts of a Greek mould and firmness, dove-like, silver-pure, pointing their rose-flowers in a Greek pride: and those wild delicate little perfections, of the li ke flame colour, beneath her arms): that isn't true. And with that (perhaps for two seconds) something happened in the mirror: a two-seconds' glimpse as of some menace that rushed upwards, like the smoke of some explosion, to yawning immensities bleak, unmeaning, unmindful of the worm that is man; into