It was a remarkable figure, and as it bore down on him in silence he studied it with oblique intentness. For it was that of an extremely tall and an extremely angular woman, well past middle life, clad in rusty black silk. On the iron-gray hair, parted and drawn severely down across the pale and narrow forehead, reposed a small black satin cap edged with coffee-colored lace. Half mittens of knitted linen were on the lank hands clasped so fastidiously in front of a narrow waist elongated by its ruchings of rusty silk. On the scrawny throat hung a cameo brooch, oddly repeating the line of the pendulous dewlap under the yellow chin, where the neck, as long and lean as a turkey’s, suggested a poised and persistent wariness. But once this was passed over, there was a general air of limpness, of deadness, about every line of the long body. It was something suggestive of starvation, of starved lives and starved souls, of empty years eked out in empty ways.
It was, Conkling had to admit, a striking enough face, with its long and narrow boniness and its high-bridged nose. But there was a promise of cruelty in the small mouth with its down-drawn corners, where the earlier lines of haughtiness had merged into a pursed-up network of little wrinkles. The eyes were deep-set and cold, of faded blue, with a touch of tragedy in the looseness of the skin-fold under the thin and high circling brows.
It was not the sort of face to make Conkling feel altogether at ease. Yet it held him spellbound. It seemed to step from another century.
He sat behind the fragile shelter of his easel, studying that face as it came to a stop before him, as it towered above him with a frown of interrogation on its flinty brows.
“Might I make so bold as to inquire the nature of your visit here?” the woman demanded in a voice as austere and unconceding as her face.
“The young lady said I might make a sketch of the garden,” he explained, exasperated by the meekness which had crept into his own voice.
The scorn on the lean old face confronting him did not add to Conkling’s happiness.
“Gentlemen were once in the habit of rising, as I remember it, when accosted by a lady.”
“I’m sorry,” cried Conkling, nettling brick red as he rose to his feet with his hat in his hand. “I beg your pardon,” he murmured again as he essayed a jack-knife bow in which deference was not visibly shot through with mockery.
“I presume you are a stranger in this neighborhood,” she said in an acridly condoning tone of voice.