Beauty! Terrible Beauty! A deathless Goddess— so she strikes our eyes!
On the day Helena was born, Ethos found its biggest emerald yet. The rock, large enough to fill the palm of her father Melchior's hand, was polished and cut; made into a gift befitting the new fair-haired princess.
The present, from her father or the gods themselves even, hasn't left her in all her twenty and so years. Always decorating her one way or another. Pinned to her hair, her chest, her glove. Sentimentality is always in season she says.
Like the jewel itself, Helena catches eyes. People look, people see and people want. Men send poems. Helena only reads reviews in the paper. Men write songs. Helena only listens to the latest trends. Men come to ask for her hand and leave with a new coat in theirs instead.
"How dreadful..!" Helena laments over the most recent of news in fashion, lounging on a sofa in a manner reminiscent of a discarded doll. "Is this what gentlemen like or what they believe others will? Either way is wrong... I mean, if we must be under a boot all our lives, can't it at least be one of better quality?"