There is in Florence a plaque by one of the della Robbia; a long throated girl's head leans from it, serenely looking down upon the world; a delicate head, with a clear brow, a pure cheek, a mouth of sad enchanting loveliness; Camelia's head was like it; saint-like in contour, but with an added air, an air of merry irresponsibility. The outward corners of her eyes smiled into a long upward curve of shadow, her brows above them made a wing-like line, wings hovering extended, and a little raised. The upward tilt pervaded the corners of her mouth, a sad mouth, yet even in repose it seemed just about to smile, and its smile sliding to a laugh. The very moulding of her cheek and chin showed a tender gaiety. As for coloring it might have been the coloring of a pensive Madonna, so white was her skin, so palely gold her smooth thick hair. She was slender too, with the long narrow hands and feet of an Artemis, and on seeing her one thought of a maiden-goddess, of a St. Cecilia, and, without surprise over the incongruity, of an intimately modern young taster of life, whose look of pagan joyousness took neither herself nor other people seriously, said "que voulez-vous," to all blame, and gently mocked puritanical earnestness.
Mrs. Fox-Darriel was plunged into the depths of an easy-chair, a type without hints and whispers to baffle and fascinate. She was thoroughly conventional and not in the least perplexing. Her elaborate head, a masterpiece of wave and coil and curl, rested against the high-chair back, its lustre a trifle suspicious where the light caught too gold a bronze on the sharp ripples.
She was considered a beauty, and her steely, regular face looked at one from every stationer's shop in London. Miss Paton's photographs were to be procured at no stationer's, one among the many differences that distinguished her from her friend.
On Camelia's "coming-out" in all the dryad-like freshness of her one and twenty years, Mrs. Fox-Darriel, smartest of the "smart," kindly determined to "form" and "launch" her. She was very winning, and Camelia seemed very willing. But Mrs. Fox-Darriel soon recognized that she was being led--not leading, soon recognized that Camelia would never follow. The first defeat was at the corsetière's visible symbol of the "forming" process. Under Mrs. Fox-Darriel's eye, Miss Paton's nymph-like slimness was measured for stays of all sorts and descriptions; Camelia, when the stays were done, surveyed her figure therein confined, with reflective rather than submissive silence.