ng else,
though she liked to be, and usually was, in the fashion. But though
faithful to Lord Holme she had, as has been said, both the appearance
and the temperament of a siren. She enjoyed governing men, and those who
were governed by her, who submitted obviously to the power of her beauty
and the charm of manner that seemed to emanate from it, and to be one
with it, were more attractive to her than those who were not. She
was inclined to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and
solemn-thinking woman, with bandeaux and convictions, admires a
clergyman for doing his duty. Carey had done his duty with such fiery
ardour that, though she did not prevent her husband from kicking him out
of the house, she could not refrain from thinking well of him.

Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.

She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not "her
type." Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love
of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy
and subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to
become Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin's affection for her, and
the peculiar form it took--of idealising her secret nature and wishing
her obvious beauty away--had won upon the egoism of her. Although she
laughed at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her
Pagan belief that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished
to influence, it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was
right, that perhaps her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart.
The thought was flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the
idea that such a loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the
ruling, she could have no real objection to being credited with a double
share of charm--the charm of face and manner which everyone, including
herself, was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim
and mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed
incense.

She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
seemed not to possess herself--imagination, passion, not only physical
but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for
distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth.