distant liner,
her face full of some dream.

This woman seemed to Trent, whose training had taught him to live in his
eyes, to make the most beautiful picture he had ever seen. Her face
of southern pallor, touched by the kiss of the wind with colour on the
cheek, presented to him a profile of delicate regularity in which there
was nothing hard; nevertheless the black brows bending down toward the
point where they almost met gave her in repose a look of something like
severity, strangely redeemed by the open curves of the mouth. Trent said
to himself that the absurdity or otherwise of a lover writing sonnets to
his mistress's eyebrow depended after all on the quality of the eyebrow.
Her nose was of the straight and fine sort, exquisitely escaping the
perdition of too much length, which makes a conscientious mind ashamed
that it cannot help, on occasion, admiring the tip-tilted. Her hat lay
pinned to the grass beside her, and the lively breeze played with her
thick dark hair, blowing backward the two broad bandeaux that should
have covered much of her forehead, and agitating a hundred tiny curls
from the mass gathered at her nape. Everything about this lady was
black, from her shoes of suede to the hat that she had discarded;
lustreless black covered her to her bare throat. All she wore was fine
and well put on. Dreamy and delicate of spirit as her looks declared
her, it was very plain that she was long-practised as only a woman grown
can be in dressing well, the oldest of the arts, and had her touch of
primal joy in the excellence of the body that was so admirably curved
now in the attitude of embraced knees. With the suggestion of French
taste in her clothes, she made a very modern figure seated there, until
one looked at her face and saw the glow and triumph of all vigorous
beings that ever faced sun and wind and sea together in the prime of
the year. One saw, too, a womanhood so unmixed and vigorous, so
unconsciously sure of itself, as scarcely to be English, still less
American.

Trent, who had halted only for a moment in the surprise of seeing the
woman in black, had passed by on the cliff above her, perceiving and
feeling as he went the things set down. At all times his keen vision and
active brain took in and tasted details with an easy swiftness that was
marvellous to men of slower chemistry; the need to stare, he held,
was evidence of blindness. Now the feeling of beauty was awakened
and exultant, and doubled