"They make me think of the States—little common kid-day butterflies. I don’t know as I ever saw them before in China."
"They are around the world," she answered. "They are always where I am because I see them. Always two—like bluebirds, and always silent like bluebirds. I see them and all well-paired things.... Once in Ireland in the fall of the year I found a cocoon, a very large and different one. It was on an old lilac tree near the bedroom window where I slept as a child. The silk was gray brown, a filmy weave like a dress my mother wore as I first remember. I loved her terribly in that dress—ah, the moths, I was telling you. I broke the branch and took the cocoon to the room. Then there was a night in the following June when I happened to be home for a few days. It was a misty windless evening of endless twilight. Great purple mists came up and breathed upon the earth and mated and melted into the holy breath that hung over the grove of copper beeches.... I am hungry and thirsty to-day, Sir Romney, or I would not talk like this. Sometimes Nature maddens me....
"But I was telling you of that June night. There was a rustle in the corner, and I ran from the little room. That house was full of ghosts to me, and there seemed no love in the world—only loneliness and twilight—my heart streaming its torrent upward and outward, but seeming to touch no living thing.
"I laughed at myself for being frightened by a little rustle and went back into the room. I saw a great gray moth at the window screen and then I remembered and ran to the desk where I had left the cocoon. The whole branch had fallen—and I got the picture of the birth of a winged thing there in the shadows. The moth itself was on the screen—a gleaming gray creation, with a light of its own about it—the light of the fairy world which I remembered from a child. The wings were whirring silently—the still strange creature poised for flight in the night, and held by this man-made screen. At the end of each feathered antenna was a pendent cross. I tried to open the screen, but it was old like all of the things of that house and I ran to find a servant.
When I returned, the moth was not alone. _Its own_ had come to it through the twilight—answering some cry we are too coarse to hear. They were there together—a mystic pair of wonderful gray mates—one on the outside of the screen, one in the room. I could not wait for the servant, but cut a door in the wire with a rough bronze paper-cutter, and away they flew together."