She had appeared, or had been manifest to me, quite suddenly. At one moment I saw the avenue of lit green, at another she was dipt in it. I could describe her now, at this distance of time--a radiant young female thing, fiercely favoured, smiling with a fierce joy, with a gleam of fierce light in her narrowed eyes. Upon her body and face was the hue of the sun's red beam; her hair, loose and fanned out behind her head, was of the colour of natural silk, but diaphanous as well as burnished, so that while the surfaces glittered like spun glass the deeps of it were translucent and showed the fire behind. Her garment was thin and grey, and it clung to her like a bark, seemed to grow upon her as a creeping stone-weed grows. Harkness would have admired the audacity of her shape, as I did; but I found nothing provocative in it. As well might a boy have enamoured himself of a slim tree as of that unearthly shaft of beauty.
I said that she preened herself; the word is inexact. She rather stood bathing in the light, motionless but for the lifting of her face into it that she might dip, or for the bending of her head that the warmth behind her might strike upon the nape of her neck. Those were all her movements, slowly rehearsed, and again and again rehearsed. With each of them she thrilled anew; she thrilled and glowed responsive to the play of the light. I don't know whether she saw me, though it seemed to me that our looks had encountered. If her eyes had taken me in I should have known it, I think; and if I had known it I should have quailed and looked at her no more. So shamefaced was I, so self-conscious, that I can be positive about that; for far from avoiding her I watched her intently, studied her in all her parts, and found out some curious things.
Looking at her beside the oaks, for instance, whence she must have emanated, I could judge why it was that I had not seen her come out. Her colouring was precisely that of her background. Her garment, smock or frock or vest as you will, was grey-green like the oak stems, her whites were those of the sky-gleams, her roses those of the sun's rays. The maze of her hair could hardly be told from the photosphere. I tested this simply and summarily. Shutting my eyes for a second, when I opened them she was gone. Shutting them again and opening, there she was, sunning herself, breathing deep and long, watching her own beauties as the light played with them. I tried this many times and it did not fail me. I could, with her assistance, bring her upon my retina or take her off it, as if I had worked a shutter across my eyes. But as I watched her so I got very excited. Her business was so mysterious, her pleasure in it so absorbing; she was visible and yet secret; I was visible, and yet she could be ignorant of it. I got the same throbbing sort of interest out of her as many and many a time I have got since out of watching other wild creatures at their affairs, crouching hidden where they could not discern me by any of their senses. Few things enthral me more than that--and here I had my first taste of it. I remember that my heart beat, I remember that I trembled. Nothing could have torn me from the spot but what precisely did, an alien intervention. The besotted Harkness stopped short in his recital and asked me what I was staring at.