"
"What babies you men can be when you get sentimental!" laughed Zaidie,
as she put her hands up to her head. "How do you know that this may not
be ugly in their eyes?"
"Quite impossible!" he replied. "They're a great deal too pretty
themselves to think _you_ ugly. Let it down!"
While he was speaking Zaidie had taken off a Spanish mantilla which she
had thrown over her head as she came out, and which the ladies of Venus
seemed to think was part of her hair. Then she took out the comb and one
or two hairpins which kept the coils in position, deftly caught the
ends, and then, after a few rapid movements of her fingers, she shook
her head, and the wondering crowd about her saw, what seemed to them a
shimmering veil, half gold, half silver, in the soft reflected light
from the cloud-veil, fall down from her head over her shoulders.
They crowded still more closely round her, but so quietly and so gently
that she felt nothing more than the touch of wondering hands on her
arms, and dress, and hair. As Redgrave said afterwards, he was
"absolutely out of it." They seemed to imagine him to be a kind of
uncouth monster, possibly the slave of this radiant being which had come
so strangely from somewhere beyond the cloud-veil. They looked at him
with their golden-yellow eyes wide open, and some of them came up rather
timidly and touched his clothes, which they seemed to think were his
skin.
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