"And will he ever do anything--anything worth while, I mean?"
She still held the thin, green volume of verse in her hand, almost contemptuously--suddenly depressed in spirits, she could not fathom why.
"He has already done something worth while."
"Small things, I mean, but of the right sort."
"I never heard of him before," murmured the woman, closing the volume with a gentle little snap of finality.
"But you will," said Repellier as his guest slowly drew on her white gloves and arranged her hair before his mirror as she passed.
"You will," he repeated as he swung his easel around to the light, and opening a door on his left called his model in for what was to be a morning of work for both of them.
Leave not thy slumbering melodies To dream too long within thine eyes; Let not all time thy bosom hold Song in that overfragrant fold, Lest thou a tardy gleaner prove And thy reluctant hand but move The overgoldened sheaf, to find Thy tenderest touch can never bind These thoughts too long unharvested-- Lest on some byway stern be shed That golden, sad, ungarnered grain, When thou canst sow nor reap again.
These souls of ours are like railway bridges--they can be reconstructed even when the trains of temptation and trial are creeping over them.--"The Silver Poppy."
Hartley's first impression of Cordelia Vaughan was a happy confusion of yellows. Her hair, luxuriant and heavily massed on the small head, was a sort of tawny gold. Her skin, which more than once had been described as like old ivory, was in truth neither ivory nor olive, but almost a pale, rose-like yellow with a transfusing warmth to its pallor, as though the lights of an open fire were playing upon it. The eyes themselves seemed, at times, a soft, jade-like yellowish green, muffled, unsatisfied, often mournful, with a latent hint of tragedy, shading off in strong lights to a sea gray; by lamplight showing a deep violet. In moments of excitement or exaltation they were slightly phosphorescent, glowing with an almost animal-like luminosity that temporarily relieved and illumined the ascetically cold chiseling of the face itself, suggesting a possible emotional power that might be stronger at times than the shell which housed it. Yet they were eyes that looked out on the world with quiet, brooding melancholy, wistful in repose, with some fugitive sadness--eyes that suggested, to the young poet at least, some wayward note of autumn, of twilight, of woodland loneliness. They seemed to betoken the dreamer in life more than the pioneer and the actor, in periods of weariness taking on a heavy, languorous, indolent look of half-careless defiance, like a tired and wilful child's.