But the inspiration, the wish to write it, came from the image--" "It is certainly true that I love to look at it, as I love to look at a picture of you--because it is you--" "As yet, no doubt, but you will soon love it for its own sake.

You are already beginning." "I love an image! You are too ridiculous, Beatrice." "Does it really seem so strange, dear?
I sometimes think you have never loved anything else." Antony had laughed down Beatrice's fancies, yet all the time she had been talking he was conscious that the idea she had suggested was appealing to him with a perverse fascination.
To love, not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of her,--surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love, a love unhampered and untainted by the earth.
As he said this to himself, his mind, ever pitilessly self-conscious, knew it was but a subterfuge, a fine euphemism for a strange desire which he had known was already growing within him; for when Beatrice had spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love--a love of beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death, inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the accidents of humanity.
To love an image with one's whole heart! If only one could achieve that--and never come out of the dream.
These thoughts gave him a new desire to look again at the image.

He felt that in some way she would be changed, and he hastened up the wood in a strange expectancy..