it the picture of a woman
half drained of her blood, veiling the wound. And a young woman, a
stranger to suffering: perhaps--as the creatures do looking for the
usual flummery tenderness, what they call happiness; wondering at
the absence of it and the shifty ghost of a husband she has got by
floundering into the bog known as Marriage. She would have it, and here
she was!

He entered the situation and was possessed by the shivering delicacy of
it. Surface emotions were not seen on her. She might be a creature
with a soul. Here and there the thing has been found in women. It is
priceless when found, and she could not be acting. One might swear the
creature had no power to act.

She spoke without offence, the simplest of words, affected no
solicitudes, put on no gilt smiles, wore no reproaches: spoke to him as
if so it happened--he had necessarily a journey to perform. One could
see all the while big drops falling from the wound within. One could
hear it in her voice. Imagine a crack of the string at the bow's deep
stress. Or imagine the bow paralyzed at the moment of the deepest
sounding. And yet the voice did not waver. She had now the richness of
tone carrying on a music through silence.

Well, then, at least, he had not been the utterly duped fool he thought
himself since the consent was pledged to wed her.

More, she had beauty--of its kind. Or splendour or grandeur, was the
term for it. But it bore no name. None of her qualities--if they were
qualities--had a name. She stood with a dignity that the word did not
express. She endured meekly, when there was no meekness. Pain breathed
out of her, and not a sign of pain was visible. She had, under his
present observation of her, beauty, with the lines of her face breaking
in revolt from beauty--or requiring a superterrestrial illumination to
show the harmony. He, as he now saw, had erred grossly in supposing her
insensitive, and therefore slow of a woman's understanding. She drew the
breath of pain through the lips: red lips and well cut. Her brown eyes
were tearless, not alluring or beseeching or repelling; they did but
look, much like the skies opening high aloof on a wreck of storm. Her
reddish hair-chestnut, if you will--let fall a skein over one of the
rugged brows, and softened the ruggedness by making it wilder, as if
a great bird were winging across a shoulder of the mountain ridges.
Conceived of the mountains, built in their image, the face partook
alternat