H. De Vere Stacpoole

“ Before me, on the opposite wall, hung a convex Venetian mirror, one of those strange mirrors that are made so perfectly and so truly that they reflect everything just as it is, even the atmosphere, so that a room reflected by them seems like a real room. ”

“ Love has never been described properly: all that about roses and altars is nonsense. Love is like being in a beautiful and mysterious room, and you push a curtain aside and you find a more mysterious and more beautiful room, and you see another curtain. ”

“ Geraldine evidently was utterly ignorant of the mirror and its picture. Geraldine the observed imagined herself unobserved: then, like a little thief, she bent her lips to kiss the woman's hair without the woman knowing. I threw my head back and caught the kiss upon my lips, I threw my arms back and caught her round the neck; never was a thief so caught in his own trap. ”