Then, as if in pursuance of a definite plan, he analysed with a
searching, vehement intensity the curious talent of the modern
Frenchman, Gustave Moreau. Margaret had lately visited the
Luxembourg, and his pictures were fresh in her memory. She had
found in them little save a decorative arrangement marred by faulty
drawing; but Oliver Haddo gave them at once a new, esoteric import.
Those effects as of a Florentine jewel, the clustered colours,
emerald and ruby, the deep blue of sapphires, the atmosphere of
scented chambers, the mystic persons who seem ever about secret,
religious rites, combined in his cunning phrases to create, as it
were, a pattern on her soul of morbid and mysterious intricacy.
Those pictures were filled with a strange sense of sin, and the
mind that contemp
