When Anne was a child, she believed the truth to be beautiful, for her tutors had told her so; and when she was a woman grown, she believed it to be malformed, for the terrible ways it twisted her world about.

"Have you considered," Dante says irritably, "that you might simply be wrong?"

She wants to snap a rejoinder that he might not be the well-spoken man of her acquaintance but certainly he is the most unfalteringly truthful, but she catches a glimpse of his face, reflected in spell-light--not beautiful or ill-formed but something all in between that is infinitely more dear.