er
delicately arched brows. A look of misgiving clouded her wide eyes of a
wondering child. The bow of an exquisitely modelled mouth, whose single
fault lay in its being perhaps a trace too wide, described a shadowy pout.

She was beautiful: yes. Nobody could question that. La beaute du diable, no
doubt, to Anglo-Saxon eyes, with that skin of incomparable texture and
whiteness relieved by a heavily coiled crown of living bronze, the crimson
insolence of that matchless mouth, those luminous and changeable eyes so
like the sea, whose green melted into blue with the swiftness of thought,
whose blue at times as swiftly shaded into stormy purple-black: but however
bizarre and barbaric, beauty none the less, and under the most meticulous
examination indisputable.

But was she as radiant as she had been?

On this her birthday she was twenty-five. Appalling age! Five years hence
she would be thirty, in ten more--forty! And woman's beauty fades so
swiftly: everybody said so. Was the shadow of to-morrow already dimming her
loveliness? How could it be otherwise? She had lived so long and so fully,
she had begun to live so young. Six years of marriage to Victor--that alone
should have been enough, one would think, to metamorphose the fairest face
into a blasted battlefield of passions.

She had a little shiver of voluptuous horror, remembering what she had
endured and escaped. The sweet, true lines of her flawlessly made body were
transiently undulant within a sheath of shimmering sequins: a daring gown,
by British standards of that day, but permissible because she was Russian;
foreigners, you know, are so frightfully weird even when they're quite all
right.

And yet she was growing old, she was twenty-five! Though she didn't feel in
the least like one on the threshold of middle age. Indeed, she had never
felt younger, more thrillingly instinct with the power and the will to live
extravagantly in one endless riot of youth unquenchable....

Reaction, of course: the swing of the pendulum to its farthest extreme. It
was now two years since she had been forced to separate from Victor,
finding herself unable longer to countenance and suffer his many-sided
beastliness; and a year since the hand of Death had penned an inexorable
finis to the too-brief chapter of her one great romance.

For there had never been love in her life with Victor. She had been too
young at first to appreciate what love and marriage meant, she had been led