rtificiality, for long apparent
to her husband's kindly but dispassionate eye. To other people Mrs.
Holland's manner, the whispering vagueness of her voice, the wistful
dwelling of her glance, was felt to be artificial only as the gold
embroideries and serrated edges on the robes of a Fra Angelico angel are
felt as something added and decorative. Kitty was far too intelligent to
try to look like a Fra Angelico angel; she was picturesque as only the
extremely fashionable can be picturesque; but Holland knew she was
conscious that she reminded people of an angel, and of a child, and that
she reminded herself continually of all sorts of exquisite things,
partly because she was dreamily self-conscious and keenly aware of
exquisiteness, and partly because he had, in their first year, the year
of sails and breezes, so impressed these things upon her attention.

He himself had grown accustomed to--perhaps a little tired of--the lily
poise of the head, the long, gentle hands, the floating step, quite the
step of an angel aware of flower-dappled grass beneath its feet and the
flutter of embroidered draperies. But Kitty, though accustomed to these
graces, in herself, had not grown tired of them, they had, indeed, more
and more filled the foreground of her delicate and decorative life, so
that he could guess at how much his own indifference had helped to
alienate her.

And now, as he turned to look at her, these half ironic, half
affectionate impressions hovered as a background, and, sharply drawn
upon it, with the biting acid of his new perceptions, he saw something
else in Kitty's face that he had never seen before.

Already he had seen her as a womanly woman, as that in its narrowest
sense. He saw her now as a type of the woman who live in and through and
for their affections, and this with their sensations rather than with
their intelligences. Vividly his memory struck them out;--the faces of
the satisfied women, taking on, as years pass over them, as experience
detaches from the craving, sentimental self, and frees the instincts to
push, climb, cling in roots and tendrils for other selves, a vegetable
serenity and simplicity;--and, more vividly, with discomfort in the
memory, the faces of the unsatisfied; the womanly married woman whose
romance is over, the spinster who has missed romance; faces chiselled to
subtlety by dreams and frustration.

On Kitty's face he saw it now, that look of a subtlety childlike,
innocent, of