The dryad

Simon sat up and rubbed his eyes while he stared back at the damsel. At first he thought that he must unawares have slipped into sleep and that he was still dreaming. Primarily he had heard no sound of footsteps through the wood; further, the girl who faced him was radiantly unlike any woman he had ever seen—and Simon in his time had seen many women. To begin with, she was taller than is the wont of womanhood, seeming tall even to him, who carried four inches over six feet. This was the first thought in Simon's drowsy mind, surprise at the stranger's height; the next, as his brain escaped from the nets and snares of sleep, was conviction that the stranger's face was fairer than any woman's face he had ever seen awake or dreaming. It was beautiful with an unfamiliar type of beauty, though he remembered dimly some ancient statues once seen and little heeded in the garden of a house of pleasure in Byzantium whose features were like the features of this woman. Her head was nobly set upon her neck; her yellow hair was gathered into a knot above the nape; her eyes shone with the most wonderful, changeful blue—they were like the sea, they were like the sky, they were like the waters of forest fountains, the floods of mountain streams. Her comely, upright body was clothed in a kind of smock of white stuff girdled about her middle with a golden girdle of ancient handicraft; her arms were bare from the shoulder; her legs were bare from the knees; her feet were shod with sandals of leather.

From the smoothness of her cheeks, from the soft color of her lips, from the slimness of her limbs, from the firm swell of her breasts beneath the fine garment, Simon would have guessed her age to be eighteen or thereabouts. Yet she seemed at once child, girl, and woman, with something boyish, too, in the firmness of her forms, in her balanced carriage, supple as an athlete's, in her air of alert repose. Never had he seen anything so vividly young; the very spirit of youth and joyousness seemed to shine in her glance, to hover on her lips, to quiver about her body as summer air quivers with the heat. Her naked arms, her naked legs were neither tanned by the sun nor stained with forest-travel; on the strong fingers of her fine hands the nails were clear-pink as sea-shells; through the candor of her skin he could see the blue veins wander. She held a bough of myrtle in her right hand, and played with it as she gazed at the man on the grass, and a childlike mirth danced in her kind, wise eyes. Her sweet mouth smiled at his awakening senses, and then she spoke—and here was a marvel! He knew what she said as well as if she were his countrywoman, and yet—it was odd—and yet she did not seem to speak as folk spoke any French that he had ever heard from salt Normandy to the Spanish hills.