Ianthe was a little bud of womanhood, dark-haired but light-headed, dressed in cream coloured clothes. She was small and right and tight, without angularities or rhythms, just one dumpy solid roundness. But she had an astonishing vulgarity of speech, if not of mind, that exacerbated him and in the dim corridors of his imagination she did not linger, she scurried as it were into doorways or upon twisting staircases or stood briefly where a loop of light fell upon her hair, her dusky face, her creamy clothes, and her delightful rotundities. She had eyes of indiscretion and a mind like a hive of bees, it had such a tiny opening and was so full of a cloying content.
One day he suddenly found himself alone with Ianthe in a glade of larch trees which they had all been sketching. They had loitered. He had been naming wild flowers which Ianthe had picked for the purpose and then thrown wantonly away. She spied a single plant of hellebore growing in the dimness under the closely planted saplings.
“Don’t! don’t!” he cried. He kept her from plucking it and they knelt down together to admire the white virginal flower.
His arm fell round Ianthe’s waist in a light casual way. He scarcely realized its presumption. He had not intended to do it; as far as that went he did not particularly want to do it, but there his arm was. Ianthe took no notice of the embrace and he felt foolish, he could not retreat until they rose to walk on; then Ianthe pressed close to his side until his arm once more stole round her and they kissed.
“Heavens above!” she said, “you do get away with it quick.”
“Life’s short, there’s no time to lose, I do as I’d be done by.”
“And there are so many of us! But glory,” said the jolly girl, taking him to her bosom, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”
She did not pick any more flowers and soon they were out of the wood decorously joining the others. He imagined that Julia’s gaze was full of irony, and the timid wonder in Kate’s eyes moved him uncomfortably. There was something idiotic in the whole affair.
Until the end of the summer he met Ianthe often enough in the little town or the city three miles off. Her uncouthness still repelled him; sometimes he disliked her completely, but she was always happy to be with him, charmingly fond and gay with all the endearing alertness of a pert bird.
Her sister Kate was not just the mere female that Ianthe was; at once sterner and softer her passions were more strong but their defences stood solid as a rock. In spite of her reserve she was always on the brink of her emotions and they, unhappily for her, were often not transient, but enduring. She was nearly thirty, still unwed. Her dark beauty, for she, too, was fine, seemed to brood in melancholy over his attentions to the other two women. She was quiet, she had little to say, she seemed to stand and wait.