Alda was so beautiful. Even on dull days her color lay luminous on white planes as flowers in the sun. Her brows, serene, outlined the dreamily moulded setting of her deep-lidded eyes.

Eyes, like boats at anchor in a lucent spirit, they contained their own cerulean voyage. Her mouth, sufficiently full, was doubly pleasing for its upper lip lifted to so ample an arc that when not closed in decision it would linger in a beginning or parting from the lower lip which curved forward and underward in subtle advance.

Thus, out of the deep shadowy corners of the mouth proceeded two short lines of closure which, opening toward the center of the coral feature, formed a reduced reproduction of that feature's general mass. A little bow revealing the pearly shutter of flat teeth beyond. In an amusing way, a tiny open mouth of expectancy within a conclusively closed one.

Of a marble, soft with having grown out of babyhood, her forehead winged with the bluish fragility of temples shading off into the almost invisible implantation of the half golden, half curling undulation caressing her face,

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inverted base-- let down the pure shaft of the nose, a pillar in
the foreground of an oval. This contour, scarcely interrupted by
the almost imperceptible mounts and hollows of underlying muscles,
showed, with the pivoting of the head, a suspicion of concavity
beneath the lovely height of the cheek; giving her that famished
look of beauty ahungered for some unimaginable consecration.

If sight were a sense that took contact with its object,
at too close quarters beauty would not disappear. But had I laid
my eye on Alda's face, like a man who, fallen flat on his stomach
in a landscape, sees nothing but the patch of earth he stares into,
I should have seen only the downy slope of a mountain of flesh--
a preposterous blow on the retina-- dwarfing the world. As a
voice becomes sonorous after leaving the lips, beauty is given off
by a face-- or rather, no beauty appears until brought to that
focus where the elements of beauty rush together in combinative
grace; beauty being ever a surreality that perturbs our response
with the indefinable extravagance of a dream.

With the heavenly blonde allure of a Luini, the virginal
sublimity of a Botticelli, her lashes pointed upwards like a crown,
she gazing cradled in her arms, admiringly, the waxen pop-eyed

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prettiness of a tow-wigged doll-- as she sat beside me in the pass-
port office. The ineffable line of her jaw leaned like the petal
of a lily against the narrow black velvet hat-ribbon tied beneath
her chin. A dream come true-- and I must run away from it for
safeguard-- I looked at her and the throbbing confusion of my brain,
the nervous concussion of my body, as I stuffed my change absent-
mindedly into my handbag-- that gripping panic that so long had
worn on me seemed to be wringing my features in the anguish of a
thousand years.

"Aren't you sorry to loose your big sister?" the consul
was asking Alda, "Your beautiful sister?"

All I remember of leaving on an early train is the por-
trait of Alda framed in the window of the railway carriage-- the
coiled wisps of corn-colored hair blowing about the unbelievable
blue of the innocence of her eyes-- the string of lapis lazuli
marbles round her neck lay like a deepened reflection those eyes
might have dropped there-- the sun-baked musceles of my boy's sturdy
legs stamping out a dance of excited farewell to one setting out on
a fabulous journey.

Alca - 4

We went ashore in Sicily where the paving and apartment
houses glistened like sugar and where I happened upon a popular
marionette show. The square, box-like proscenium was crowded with
classic warriors armoured in imitation gold. Of heroic proportion,
they reached the floor to knock the helmets on their heads upon the
ceiling. The jerks of their sword-raising, shield-clutching
wooden hands hung in a realistic automatism from that 'wire' by
which, at the time, all the bamboozled combattants of the World War
were being 'pulled.'

Our boat-- perhaps the Conti Verdi, Rossi, di Savoia, or
Conti something or other-- zig-zagged, to dodge the submarines, as
near to the coast as it could-- which course considerably lengthened
our crossing.

One day we were all called to the upper deck, given life-
belts and cards assigning us to various life boats which were al-
ready swung out on their hawsers over the sea.

The captain announced emergency drill, and we waited,
joking, for a long while. The emigrants, mostly Italian peasants,

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pace of a giant search-light.

Breasts of battleships afloat upon the waters like iron-clad swans under their clouds of steam are suddenly irradiated to fade recurrently into the shades of night.

Opening out from different directions, the lesser search-lights, clashing their blades of clarity, mill a motionless blackness, while miniature diamond patterns flit over the slopes of Gibraltar as unknowable bodies move in and out of distant rooms.

Incessant ray-- regal ride of search-light-- of ships-- converging in a methodic measure of a marine gavotte-- rhythm of defense-- of advance-- rhythm of dominion.

The beacon extends a royal wink, indicating this wondrous searchlight as the eye of Neptune risen from the wave to watch over that Empire on which the sun - - - - .

The voyage lengthened-- day by day-- the waves lapped-- the skies drifted-- .

Among the usual predominance of middle-aged women, mis-shapen for never having concentrated on beauty, there was one

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slightly younger. Extremely popular, she bustled about their knitting, stimulating conversation with a degree of intimacy with life. So exceptional in one resembling themselves, they welcomed it as if perchance she might stand for their vindication.

My concern for prostitutes being the same as for all other people, it seemed illogical that this sociable person should embody, for me, exactly the figment a maniac puritan brain would create out of what it supposed a prostitute to be. She seemed so rich in filth, her glance left a stain.

One evening, darting scandalized out of a water-closet in the women's lavatory, I ran straight into her. It was my intuition to pass her by, but my reason argued, "Am I not prejudiced-- should she not be shown the same solicitude as others--."

"Don't go in there," I pointed out, "An *Eye* is glued to the port-hole-- watching the flush!"

With a dominant sneer of intense disdain this unfortunate woman snarled at me, and, making a dash for the door I had indicated, she entered, slamming it shut. Evidently some women are more soothing than she.

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Evidently some women are more soothing than she-- back
in my cabin I found the Swedish stewardess who had 'turned down'
the covers on the berth.

"So-o-o-- you have a clock," she mused, lifting that
story-without-words of a lonely face, "It's a faithful companion--
a clock."

When we put in there was quite a scandal-- the lady of
the lavatory, to the surprise of her cronies-- was not permitted to
land.

On two occasions I have come upon New York as if arriving
in _real_ Paradise-- at dawn and in the dark of night. This first
time of all it was at dawn.

In my girlhood, when I first left England, I saw some-
thing I had so far missed-- the sunrise. It was in Holland.
"For one thing," I said instructively to myself, "Abroad, the sun
is enormous." Long before breakfast, this foreign sun had ridden
up to its acceptable proportion of a yolk of an egg.

Later, when after ferocious battles, I went to Paris
expecting a shimmering transformation pretty much like the epilogue

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of a pantomime. In my abysmal ignorance, I found nothing refresh-
ing; the facades on the streets looked just as grimy.

I gave up my hope-- subconscious hope-- of recapturing
that brilliancy of environment I had known in infancy on whatever
pilgrimage abroad.

I expected nothing of New York. The final negation
of the idyllic

I expected nothing of New York but the final negation of
the idyllic-- had not a long line of well-groomed Americans, in-
cluding solid Mrs. Stamford White, warned me, "all people of fine
perception flee the place-- it has no nuance, no romance-- a vast
den of a composite myriad clawed human monster clutching spas-
modically at the dollar. Such was New York as represented to me
by the cultured Americans browsing in Italy.

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Dawn floated across the new horizon on the opal clouds of a glorified mist. Thereout, as from the astonishing breath of the creator, arose the vertiginous flight of an architecture conceived in a child's dream.

Relieved of their foundations by this irridescent vapor of sunrise, sensational buildings ascended into heaven with the glittering clamor of a myriad windows set like colored diamonds all over their interminable facades.

As if sprung up from a triumphal shout like festal rose-reflecting ribbon straightened in serried rows, the static of their solidity become, in the optical delusion of an early morn, full-diaphanous screens for a virgin alight.

In comparison to this the towers of San Miniato are puny, the palaces of fairies, failures.

Alda - 11

Gloria had come to meet me, looking rich with a red chow.
We drove off in her father's car.

The sun-sharpened towers of Wall Street were so like a
monstrous progeny of England's Cliffs, I felt cheated that no in-
ordinately elongated gulls flew out of the office windows.

I had always imagined the elevated railway as trailing
like lace along the clouds-- and the thickset structure darkening
the street brought me down to a recognizable reality as we passed
by the brownstone houses. They reminded me of the monotonous streets
of my early 'walks.'