went for him in the
Chamber yesterday and Adolphine wondering how she shall make her
wedding-parties seem only half as grand as Bertha's. . .."

She let him talk and he never ended: he could go on prattling for ever.
His mother, sisters and nieces often told him to stop, moved away and
left him in the midst of his outpourings; but Constance liked him, saw,
indeed, a good deal of truth in what he said, in spite of all his
humbug. He saw through the people around him with an insight which
surprised her and which she was startled to find was not wholly
inaccurate. It was certainly true that these people were not simply
natural and merry. They had come there from politeness to Bertha and Van
Naghel; but, in reality, one was tired, the other envious....

"Auntie," said Emilie, who was walking round the room on Van Raven's
arm, "if Paul once gets hold of you, he'll never let you go...."

She called her youngest uncle by his Christian name. She was really a
pretty girl, though Paul did not see any good-looking people there, and,
by the side of her, her future husband was such a pale, insignificant
person that people wondered why she had accepted him. She was rather
thin, but there was something dainty, uncommon and original about her in
her cloudy white frock; she had a pair of charming eyes of a
strangely-twinkling gold-grey, like an unknown jewel; her hair was
reddish, with a glint of gold in it; and there were a few tiny freckles
on the clear-white complexion which often goes with that hair. She had a
pretty laugh, a soft voice, a coaxing way of being nice and saying
pleasant things; and, above all, she possessed an innate distinction
and, as she passed, white and gleaming, she had something, one would
almost have said, of a very beautiful alabaster ornament, or of a snowy
azalea in the sunlight: a luminous fairness, dainty and transparently
veined with palest blue. Constance knew that Emilie had a talent,
something more than the usual girlish accomplishment, for painting, but
that, in her busy life as a young society-girl, she had never had the
opportunity to develop it. And Constance wondered at Van Raven, pale,
thin, stuttering, stammering, spruce and yet awkward, with one shoulder
higher than the other and his three hairs of a moustache twisted up
towards his eyes. He was at the Foreign Office and he belonged to a
family whose rigid Dutch orthodoxy was shocked by much in the Van Lowes,
in the Van Naghels and especiall