He was most anxious to hear my description. I said that I imagined Miss Brandon to be as changeable in appearance as the sky. I explained to him that I had not always been blind, that my blindness had come comparatively late in life from a shooting accident, in which I lost one eye--the sight of the other I lost gradually afterwards. I had imagined her as the lady who walked in the garden in Shelley's _Sensitive Plant_ (I could not remember all the quotation):
"A sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean."
Still, and rather mysterious, elusive and rare. He said I was right about the variability, but that he saw her differently. It was true she was pale, delicate, and extremely refined, but her eyes were the interesting thing about her. She was like a sapphire. She looked better in the daytime than in the evening. By candle-light she seemed to fade. She did not remind him of Shelley at all. She was not ethereal nor diaphanous. She was a sapphire, not a moonstone. She belonged to the world of romance, not to the world of lyric poetry. Something had been left out when she had been created. She was unfinished. What had been left out? Was it her soul? Was it her heart? Was she Undine? No. Was she Lilith? No. All the same she belonged to the fairy-tale world; to the Hans Andersen world, or to Perrault. The Princess without ... without what? She was the Sleeping Beauty in the wood, who had woken up and remembered nothing, and could never recover from the long trance. She would never be the same again. Never really awake in the world. And yet she had brought nothing back from fairyland except her looks.
"She reminds me," he said, "of a line of Robert Lytton's: 'All her looks are poetry and all her thoughts are prose.' It is not that she is prosaic, but she is muffled. You see, during that long slumber which lasted a hundred years----" Rudd had now quite forgotten my presence and was talking or, rather, murmuring to himself. He was composing aloud. "During that long exile which lasted a hundred years, and passed in a flash, she had no dreams."
"No, not that," he answered, "heart as much as you like. She is kind. She is affectionate. But no passion, no dreams. Above all, no dreams. That is what she is. The Princess without any dreams. Do you think that would do as a title? No, it is not quite right. _The Sleeping Beauty in the World?_ No. Why did Rostand use the title, _La Princesse Lointaine_? That would have done. No, that is not quite right either. She is not far away. She is here. She looks far away and isn't. I must think about it. It will come."