The lady Vivian in a fragile sheath Of crimson, dimmed and veiled ineffably By the flame-shaken gloom wherein she sat, And twinkled if she moved, heard Merlin coming, And smiled as if to make herself believe Her joy was all a triumph; yet her blood Confessed a tingling of more wonderment Than all her five and twenty worldly years Of waiting for this triumph could remember; And when she knew and felt the slower tread Of his unseen advance among the shadows To the small haven of uncertain light That held her in it as a torch-lit shoal Might hold a smooth red fish, her listening skin Responded with a creeping underneath it, And a crinkling that was incident alike To darkness, love, and mice. When he was there, She looked up at him in a whirl of mirth And wonder, as in childhood she had gazed Wide-eyed on royal mountebanks who made So brief a shift of the impossible That kings and queens would laugh and shake themselves; Then rising slowly on her little feet, Like a slim creature lifted, she thrust out Her two small hands as if to push him back-- Whereon he seized them. "Go away," she said; "I never saw you in my life before."-- "You say the truth," he answered; "when I met Myself an hour ago, my words were yours. God made the man you see for you to like, If possible. If otherwise, turn down These two prodigious and remorseless thumbs And leave your lions to annihilate him."--
"I have no other lion than yourself," She said; "and since you cannot eat yourself, Pray do a lonely woman, who is, you say, More like a tree than any other thing In your discrimination, the large honor Of sharing with her a small kind of supper."-- "Yes, you are like a tree,--or like a flower; More like a flower to-night." He bowed his head And kissed the ten small fingers he was holding, As calmly as if each had been a son; Although his heart was leaping and his eyes Had sight for nothing save a swimming crimson Between two glimmering arms. "More like a flower To-night," he said, as now he scanned again The immemorial meaning of her face And drew it nearer to his eyes. It seemed A flower of wonder with a crimson stem Came leaning slowly and regretfully To meet his will--a flower of change and peril That had a clinging blossom of warm olive Half stifled with a tyranny of black, And held the wayward fragrance of a rose Made woman by delirious alchemy. She raised her face and yoked his willing neck With half her weight; and with hot lips that left The world with only philosophy For Merlin or for Anaxagoras, Called his to meet them and in one long hush Of capture to surrender and make hers The last of anything that might remain Of what were now their beardless wizardry. Then slowly she began to push herself Away, and slowly Merlin let her go As far from him as his outreaching hands Could hold her fingers while his eyes had all The beauty of the woodland and the world Before him in the firelight, like a nymph Of cities, or a queen a little weary Of inland stillness and immortal trees. "Are you to let me go again sometime," She said,--"before I starve to death, I wonder? If not, I'll have to bite the lion's paws, And make him roar. He cannot shake his mane, For now the lion has no mane to shake; The lion hardly knows himself without it, And thinks he has no face, but there's a lady Who says he had no face until he lost it. So there we are. And there's a flute somewhere, Playing a strange old tune. You know the words: 'The Lion and the Lady are both hungry.'"