"Poor soul!" Mrs. Delarayne exclaimed. "She does her best. She would take him, of course, simply because it will soon be an indignity for her to remain single one minute longer. She would probably die of shame too if someone else took Denis from her. But I think you know, that the man who provokes Cleo's love will have to be a little bit different from Denis."
CHAPTER II
On being dismissed from her mother's presence, Cleopatra did not go as she had been commanded to her mirror in order to remove the little shadow of down that adorned her upper lip. She retired instead to the library, and ensconcing herself in one of the large leather easy chairs, continued her reading of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.
Occasionally while she read she would raise her eyes from the printed page to look at her unengaged hand as it rested on the arm of the chair she occupied, and for some moments she would be wrapped in thought.
There had been no lack of competition for that hand since the day when, at her coming-out dance, she had so eagerly extended it to Life for all that Life had to offer. It was not that it had come back empty to her side that made her sad. If occasionally she was moved by a little bitterness about her brief existence, it was rather because the kind of things with which her outstretched hand had been filled were so dismally unsatisfying. She counted the men she had been compelled to refuse. They numbered only two, but there were at least three others whom she had never allowed to get as far as a proposal.
Again for the hundredth time she passed them in review. Had she acted wisely? Were they so utterly impossible? Now, at the age of twenty-five, her worldly wisdom answered, "Nay," but deep down in her breast a less cultivated and more vigorous impulse answered most emphatically "Yea."
From early girlhood onwards Cleopatra had cherished very definite ideas about the man of her taste. In this she was by no means exceptional. But perhaps the circumstances that she had abided more steadfastly than most by the pattern her imagination had originally limned distinguished her from her more fickle sisters. The fault she found with the modern world was that it did not offer you man whole or complete, but only in fragments. To be quite plain, it offered you, from the athlete to the poet, a series of isolated manly characteristics, but it did not give you all the manly characteristics in one being at once, which constituted the all-round man of her dreams.
Whether it was that man had specialised too much of recent years, or what the reason might be, Cleopatra could not tell. But whenever she passed the men of her acquaintance in review, she always arrived at the same conclusion, that each represented only a fragment of what the whole man of her ideal was, and doubtless of what man himself had once been. It was as if she had been deposited among the ruins of a once beautiful cathedral. Fine pieces of screen architecture, exquisite portions of the capitals, delightful gargoyles, lay in profusion all around: but the whole building could be reconstructed in all its majesty, only by an effort of the imagination. This effort of the imagination she had made as a girl of seventeen.