The Bear had always expected the possessors of beauty to understand the meanings of  the treasure whose improbable wealth they manifested and over which they stood guard. He had expected, ever since he  had first fallen in love with the human form, beautiful women not to be dumb and bimbotesque, as local legend had it, but on the contrary to be wiser than anyone else in view. This he knew to be an offshoot of his subjective inexperience and therefore mere romance, although in Iris’ case he was sure that it was really so: how she looked was the index of the otherwise inexpressible delicacy of her inner soul, the merest sign of  who she was and  what, in the wide and ordered amplitude of the universe, she might finally represent.