"'All beautiful in naked purity!'" What a tawdry
world was this in which clothes and food and houses are necessary! How
perfectly that boy poet had understood it all. "'Immortal amid ruin'!" She
liked the idea of the ruin almost as well as that of the immortality, and
the stains quite as well as the purity. As immortality must come, and as
stains were instinct with grace, why be afraid of ruin? But then, if
people go wrong--at least women--they are not asked out anywhere! "'Sudden
arose Ianthe's soul; it stood all beautiful----.'" And so the piece was
learned, and Lizzie felt that she had devoted her hour to poetry in a
quite rapturous manner. At any rate she had a bit to quote; and though in
truth she did not understand the exact bearing of the image, she had so
studied her gestures and so modulated her voice, that she knew that she
could be effective. She did not then care to carry her reading further,
but returned with the volume into the house. Though the passage about
Ianthe's soul comes very early in the work, she was now quite familiar
with the poem, and when in after days she spoke of it as a thing of beauty
that she had made her own by long study, she actually did not know that
she was lying.
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