"How pretty you are!" he retorted.
And it was true. She was very pretty, a girlish creature, thin and eager looking, with large tobacco-brown eyes full of a humorous, observant interest in everything. Her skin was dark and smooth as satin. Even her long throat and nervous hands, and the slim, lace-covered arms, were of the same satin-textured duskiness as the heart-shaped face, with its laughing red mouth. Her cheekbones were rather high and touched with colour, as if a geranium petal had been rubbed across them, just under the brown shadows beneath the eyes. Her chin was small and pointed, her forehead low and broad, and this, with the slight prominence of the cheekbones and the narrowing of the chin, gave that heartlike shape to her face which added piquancy and made it singularly endearing.
She was very tall and graceful, with pretty ways of using her hands, and looking from under her lashes with her head on one side, which showed that she had been a spoiled and petted child.
"Yes, I'm quite pretty," she agreed gayly, "and I have on a pretty dress, which is part of my trousseau, and I hope it will last a long time. But the thing I am principally interested in just now is our flat. Call this a 'living-room' at once, or I shall feel homesick and burst into tears. The question is, do you think it is pretty?"
"Awfully pretty; looks like you somehow," answered Dick, gazing around appreciatively. "Jolly chintz with roses on it, and your rugs are ripping. Everything goes so well with everything else."
"It ought to. I have taken enough trouble over it all, introducing wedding presents to each other and trying to make them congenial. I have no boudoir, so I can't boude. But St. George has a study with books up to the ceiling, and lots still on the floor, because we are not settled yet, though we arrived—strangers in a strange land—in November. I expect you'll recognize some of the things here, because old colonial furniture doesn't grow on blackberry bushes in this climate, and I brought over everything Grandma Carleton left me: that desk, and cabinet and mirror, and those three near-Chippendale chairs. Wouldn't the poor darling make discords on her golden harp, or moult important feathers out of her wings, if she could see her parlour furniture in a room at Monte Carlo?"
"Nice way for a par—I mean a chaplain's wife to talk," said Dick.
"I've been so prim for three whole months," Rose Winter excused herself, "except, of course, when I'm alone with St. George."
"Ever since you were married. Poor kid! But don't you have to be prim with him?"
"Good gracious, no! That would be death. I arranged with him the day I definitely said yes, and again on our wedding eve, so as to have no misunderstanding, that I might keep all my pet slang, and even use language if I felt it really necessary; otherwise he would certainly have been the 'Winter of my discontent.'"