For an instant she struck him dumb. Was Tira so lovely? To him certainly she had a beauty almost inexpressible. But was it really inherent in her? Or was it something in the veil he found about her, that haze of hopeless suffering?
"Do you think she's beautiful?"
His voice was keen; curiosity had thinned it to an edge. Nan answered it with exactness.
"I think she's the most beautiful thing I ever saw. She doesn't know it. If she did, she'd probably wave her hair and put on strange chiffons, what Charlotte calls dewdads. She'd have to be the cleverest woman on earth to resist them. And because she's probably never been an inch out of this country neighborhood, she'd rig herself up—Charlotte again!—in the things the girls like round here. But she either doesn't know her power or she doesn't care."
"I'm inclined to think," said Raven slowly, "she never has looked at herself in that way. It has brought her things she doesn't want, things that made her suffer. And she's worked so hard trying to manage the whole business—life and her sufferings—she hasn't had time to lay much stress on her looks."
"It's all so strange," said Nan, as if the barriers were down and she wanted to indicate something hardly clear to herself. "You see, she isn't merely beautiful. Most of us look like what we are. We're rather nice looking, like me, or we're plain. But she 'takes back,' as Charlotte would say. She reminds you of things, pictures, and music, and dead queens—isn't there a verse about 'queens that died young and fair'?—and—O heavens, Rookie! I can't say it—but all the old hungers and happinesses, the whole business."
"I wonder," said Raven impetuously, "if you think she's got any mind at all. Or whether it's nothing but line and color?"
Nan shook her head.
"She's got something better than a mind. She has a faithful heart. And if a man—a man I cared about—got bewitched by her, I'd tell him to snatch her up and run off with her, and even if he found she was hollow inside, he'd have had a minute worth living for, and he could take his punishment and say 'twas none too much."
"You'd tell him!" Raven suggested, smiling at her heat and yet moved by it. "You weren't going to fetter your man by telling him anything."