He was not wrong in the impression of her good looks that he had carried away from the short interview at Siena. She had a charmingly chiselled face, with a free, pure outline, a clear, fair complexion, and the eyes and hair of a dusky beauty. Her features had a firmness which suggested tranquillity, and yet her expression was light and quick, a combination--or a contradiction--which gave an original stamp to her beauty. Bernard remembered that he had thought it a trifle “bold”; but he now perceived that this had been but a vulgar misreading of her dark, direct, observant eye. The eye was a charming one; Bernard discovered in it, little by little, all sorts of things; and Miss Vivian was, for the present, simply a handsome, intelligent, smiling girl. He gave her an opportunity to make an allusion to Siena; he said to her that his friend told him that she and her mother had been spending the winter in Italy.
“Oh yes,” said Angela Vivian; “we were in the far south; we were five months at Sorrento.”
“We spent a few days in Rome. We usually prefer the quiet places; that is my mother’s taste.”
“It was not your mother’s taste, then,” said Bernard, “that brought you to Baden?”
Longueville glanced about at the moving, murmuring crowd, at the lighted windows of the Conversation-house, at the great orchestra perched up in its pagoda.
“This is not my idea of absolute tranquillity.”
“Nor mine, either,” said Miss Vivian. “I am not fond of absolute tranquillity.”
“How do you arrange it, then, with your mother?”
Again she looked at him a moment, with her clever, slightly mocking smile.
“As you see. By making her come where I wish.”
“You have a strong will,” said Bernard. “I see that.”
“No. I have simply a weak mother. But I make sacrifices too, sometimes.”
Bernard began to laugh, and then he told her she must have had a very happy life--“to call a winter at Sorrento a sacrifice.”
“It depends upon what one gives up,” said Miss Vivian.
She touched him with her mocking smile again.
“That is not a very civil question, asked in that way.”
“You mean that I seem to doubt your abnegation?”
“You seem to insinuate that I had nothing to renounce. I gave up--I gave up--” and she looked about her, considering a little--“I gave up society.”