It was some time before Kingston could turn his attention from the clothes to the woman that they so disastrously symbolized. Here, too, he met at every point with a violation of all his favourite canons. Isabel Darrell was evidently as untidy as her garments. Her figure was long and elastic. Only a certain arrogant untidiness of carriage could save her from the reproach of lankiness. She walked with a free unconventional swing from the hips, with a sort of bounding spring that might have been more pleasantly noteworthy had it not set her hat mopping and mowing afresh at every step. At every step it jauntily jumped, up and down, and from right to left, until the attention was concentrated on its antics rather than on any beauties that might have been found in the gait which compelled them. Very different indeed was the barbaric looseness of Isabel’s movement from the neat and civilized precision of Gundred’s every motion. That she wore no stays was very evident, and the flapping freedom of her legs suggested that her nature had been built for breeches rather than for petticoats.
Her face, when you came to look at it, was not, perhaps, quite so terrible as might have been expected. In fact, Kingston found it rather disappointing in its possibilities. He consoled himself by noticing that the mouth was ridiculously wide, revealing, too, a glimpse of gold; but, still, it was an eager, mobile mouth, full of energetic vitality. Gundred’s pretty, definite lips invariably preserved their proper lines; but Isabel’s had smiles and flashes of feeling that kept no limits and obeyed no conventions. Agile, too, and expressive beyond due bounds, they had a gleaming redness that was put to shame by the decent pallor of her cousin’s. Her face was irregular, uneven, unconventional, yet not without a certain heady and unlawful charm. Like her mouth, it was so very much alive. It did not seem, as did Gundred’s, to be a moulded mask, but to be the woman’s very own naked soul. The claim of her birth was clear in the strangely delicate beauty of her ears--the only part of her that could ever, by any possibility, be called neat or dainty--and in the firm, fine curves of her nose and upper lip. The nose especially, swift and decided in its line, carried high and defiant, had the long thin nostrils, sensitive, fierce, cruel in their lifted curve, that one sees in the conspicuous women of old ferocious days. Kingston and Gundred had seen them in the face of Isabel the Queen.