The Call of the Blood

E-text prepared by Chris Curnow, Suzanne Shell, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)
Transcriber's Notes:
Some minor changes have been made to correct typographical errors and inconsistencies. The original book has no table of contents. In this version I have added one to allow the reader to jump to a particular chapter.


On a dreary afternoon of November, when London was closely wrapped in a yellow fog, Hermione Lester was sitting by the fire in her house in Eaton Place reading a bundle of letters, which she had just taken out of her writing-table drawer. She was expecting a visit from the writer of the letters, Emile Artois, who had wired to her on the previous day that he was coming over from Paris by the night train and boat.
Miss Lester was a woman of thirty-four, five feet ten in height, flat, thin, but strongly built, with a large waist and limbs which, though vigorous, were rather unwieldy. Her face was plain: rather square and harsh in outline, with blunt, almost coarse features, but a good complexion, clear and healthy, and large, interesting, and slightly prominent brown eyes, full of kindness, sympathy, and brightness, full, too, of eager intelligence and of energy, eyes of a woman who was intensely alive both in body and in mind. The look of swiftness, a look most attractive in either human being or in animal, was absent from her body but was present in her eyes, which showed forth the spirit in her with a glorious frankness and a keen intensity. Nevertheless, despite these eyes and her thickly growing, warm-colored, and wavy brown hair, she was a plain, almost an ugly woman, whose attractive force issued from within, inviting inquiry and advance, as the flame of a fire does, playing on the blurred glass of a window with many flaws in it.
Hermione was, in fact, found very attractive by a great many people of varying temperaments and abilities, who were captured by her spirit and by her intellect, the soul of the woman and the brains, and who, while seeing clearly and acknowledging frankly the plainness of her face and the almost masculine ruggedness of her form, said, with a good deal of truth, that somehow they didn't seem to matter in Hermione. Whether Hermione herself was of this opinion not many knew. Her general popularity, perhaps, made the world incurious about the subject.