as creamy
milk; and on each cheek, just beneath the shadow under her eyes, is a
faint pink stain, as if it had been tapped hard with a carnation, and a
little of the colour had come off. Perhaps, if her face has a fault, the
nose is too short and flat, but it gives her a sweetly young and
innocent look, added to her eyes being set far apart. And the eyes are
really glorious: very big and long, with deep shadows under them only
partly cast by her thick black lashes. A man once wrote a Valentine
verse to Di, in which he remarked that her eyes were "like sapphires
gleaming blue where they had fallen among dark grasses"; and it wasn't a
bad comparison. The man died of taking too much veronal a year after.
Nobody said he had done it on purpose. But I wondered. He was very
unhappy the day he said "Good-bye" to Ballyconal. I've never been able
to forget his look.

Di's mouth is large, and a tiny bit greedy, but all the more fascinating
for that, because it is so red and curved. Her forehead is rather high,
really, but she makes it seem only a white line above her level
eyebrows, because of the way she likes best to wear her crinkly dark
hair: parted in the middle, pushed forward and down, and banded in place
by a rope of hair from the back.

That night for the ball at the American Embassy she had it fastened with
big, very green jade hairpins. From her little pink ears hung long loops
of emeralds (heirlooms in our family, or they would have been sold long
ago), and the gown she chose was the same shade of green: some very
thin, soft stuff, with one of those new names dressmakers think of in
their dreams. It was simply made, and not very expensive; but in it Di
looked like a classic personification of Ireland at its loveliest, and I
was sure that not the best-dressed girl in the room would be as
exquisite as she. I told her this on an impulse, and she was pleased.
Yet she sighed. Of course she couldn't help knowing, said she, that she
wasn't bad looking. But Venus or Helen of Troy couldn't make a success,
handicapped as she was.

"It might be different in some other country," she went on, more to
herself than to me. "A country like America, where titles are more of a
novelty, and everybody one meets doesn't remember all about one's poor
mother."

"Now I must run and get ready, myself," said I, when I had established
connection between Diana's most intricate hooks and eyes.

"Get ready? For what, dear?"

"Why, for the b