ses,
and terracotta plaques framed in ruby plush, hanging upon it--a
perfectly horrible room. Half a dozen of the plaques are in there; the
birds she spared me. She had one or two lovely old family things which
I'd allowed myself to hope for; a Spode tea-set I remember. But, no;
there's nothing worth looking at."

Mrs. Conyers lightly dusted her hands together, and rose from her knees.
She was, at thirty-eight, a very graceful woman; tall, of ample form,
and attired with fashionable ease and fluency. Fashion had been a late
development with Gwendolen. In her gaunt and wistful girlhood she had
worn her hair in drooping Rossettian masses, and her throat had been
differently bare. Now she was as accurate as she was easy. Her hair was
even a little too sophisticatedly distended, and her long pearl
ear-rings, though they became the tender violet of her eyes, emphasized,
as her former Pre-Raphaelite ornaments had not seemed to do, a certain
genial commonplaceness in the contours of her cheek and chin. But almost
fat and decisively unpoetical as she had become, it was undeniable that
this last phase of dress and, in especial, these widow's weeds, with
sinuous lines of jet and lustrous falls of fringes, became her better
than any in which Owen remembered to have seen her.

Gwendolen's drawing-room, too, had undergone, since the days of her
girlhood, as complete a metamorphosis as she had. When she had married
and left the big house in Kensington where Owen had spent many a happy
holiday--when she had married crabbed old Mr. Conyers, the Chislebridge
dignitary, and gone to live in Chislebridge, her convictions had at once
expressed themselves luxuriantly in large-patterned wall-papers and
deep-cushioned divans and in Eastern fabrics draping the mantelpiece or
cast irrelevantly over carved Indian screens. Her teas had been brought
in on trays of Indian beaten brass, and the mosque-like opening between
the front and back drawing-room had been hung with translucent curtains
of beaded reeds, through which one had to plunge as though through a
sheet of dropping water. Owen well remembered their tinkle and rattle
and the perfume of burning Eastern pastilles that greeted one when,
emerging, one found oneself in the dim, rich gloom among the divans and
the brasses and the palms. In those days Gwendolen had been draped
rather than dressed, and the gestures and attitudes of her languid arms
and wrists seemed more adapted to a dulcimer th