She spoke without offence, the simplest of words, affected no solicitudes, put on no gilt smiles, wore no reproaches: spoke to him as if so it happened--he had necessarily a journey to perform. One could see all the while big drops falling from the wound within. One could hear it in her voice. Imagine a crack of the string at the bow’s deep stress. Or imagine the bow paralyzed at the moment of the deepest sounding. And yet the voice did not waver. She had now the richness of tone carrying on a music through silence.
Well, then, at least, he had not been the utterly duped fool he thought himself since the consent was pledged to wed her.
More, she had beauty--of its kind. Or splendour or grandeur, was the term for it. But it bore no name. None of her qualities--if they were qualities--had a name. She stood with a dignity that the word did not express. She endured meekly, when there was no meekness. Pain breathed out of her, and not a sign of pain was visible. She had, under his present observation of her, beauty, with the lines of her face breaking in revolt from beauty--or requiring a superterrestrial illumination to show the harmony. He, as he now saw, had erred grossly in supposing her insensitive, and therefore slow of a woman’s understanding. She drew the breath of pain through the lips: red lips and well cut. Her brown eyes were tearless, not alluring or beseeching or repelling; they did but look, much like the skies opening high aloof on a wreck of storm. Her reddish hair-chestnut, if you will--let fall a skein over one of the rugged brows, and softened the ruggedness by making it wilder, as if a great bird were winging across a shoulder of the mountain ridges. Conceived of the mountains, built in their image, the face partook alternately of mountain terror or splendour; wholly, he remembered, of the splendour when her blood ran warm. No longer the chalk-quarry face,--its paleness now was that of night Alps beneath a moon chasing the shadows.
‘You remember I told you,’ he said, ‘I have given my word--I don’t break it--to be at a Ball. Your uncle was urgent to have the ceremony over. These clashes occur. The people here--I have spoken of that: people of good repute for attention to guests. I am uncertain of the time... we have all to learn to wait. So then, good-bye till we meet.’