Among all these fresh young girls, she could easily hold her
own, not because of her beauty, but because of that deeper fascination
which she shed like a light or a perfume. She had the something more
than beauty which these girls lacked and could never acquire--a
legendary enchantment, the air of romance. Was this the result, he
wondered now, of what she had missed in life rather than of what she had
attained? Was it because she had never lived completely, because she had
preferred the dream to the event, because she had desired and refrained,
because she had missed both enchantment and disenchantment--was it
because of the profound inadequacy of experience, that she had been able
to keep undimmed the glow of her loveliness? It was not that she looked
young, he realized while he watched her, but that she looked ageless and
immortal, a creature of the spirit. While he gazed at her across the
violent whirl of colours in the ballroom, he remembered the evening star
shining silver white in the afterglow.
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