brown hair and wet brown boa should have evoked only associations as
pleasing; but each effort to fit her image into his past resulted in the
same memories of boredom and a vague discomfort...

II

"Don't you remember me now--at Mrs. Murrett's?" She threw the question at
Darrow across a table of the quiet coffee-room to which, after a vainly
prolonged quest for her trunk, he had suggested taking her for a cup of
tea.

In this musty retreat she had removed her dripping hat, hung it on the
fender to dry, and stretched herself on tiptoe in front of the round
eagle-crowned mirror, above the mantel vases of dyed immortelles, while
she ran her fingers comb-wise through her hair. The gesture had acted on
Darrow's numb feelings as the glow of the fire acted on his circulation;
and when he had asked: "Aren't your feet wet, too?" and, after
frank inspection of a stout-shod sole, she had answered cheerfully:
"No--luckily I had on my new boots," he began to feel that human
intercourse would still be tolerable if it were always as free from
formality.

The removal of his companion's hat, besides provoking this reflection,
gave him his first full sight of her face; and this was so
favourable that the name she now pronounced fell on him with a quite
disproportionate shock of dismay.

"Oh, Mrs. Murrett's--was it THERE?"

He remembered her now, of course: remembered her as one of the shadowy
sidling presences in the background of that awful house in Chelsea, one
of the dumb appendages of the shrieking unescapable Mrs. Murrett, into
whose talons he had fallen in the course of his head-long pursuit of
Lady Ulrica Crispin. Oh, the taste of stale follies! How insipid it was,
yet how it clung!

"I used to pass you on the stairs," she reminded him.

Yes: he had seen her slip by--he recalled it now--as he dashed up to
the drawing-room in quest of Lady Ulrica. The thought made him steal a
longer look. How could such a face have been merged in the Murrett
mob? Its fugitive slanting lines, that lent themselves to all manner of
tender tilts and foreshortenings, had the freakish grace of some young
head of the Italian comedy. The hair stood up from her forehead in a
boyish elf-lock, and its colour matched her auburn eyes flecked with
black, and the little brown spot on her cheek, between the ear that was
meant to have a rose behind it and the chin that should have rested on
a ruff. When she smiled, the left corner of her mouth wen