pointedly
serious in any way, not conventionally at her ease either. And so clearly
was he impressed by her transparency in simplicity of expression, that he
took without a spurn at 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