As their minds clashed in preliminary conversational skirmishing, some sense of her restful loveliness came to him. It was her eyes that spoke most clearly—those lighted windows in the spirit's comely house. Jane's eyes were a deep, swimming brown, with an effect of largeness and roundness, as if she looked upon the irregular march of the hours with the unfeigned naïveté of a child—a semblance heightened by a starlike radiance of the eyes themselves and the long shielding eyelashes. They seemed less to stand off and inspect him, than to reach out and envelop him, bringing him within their substance. Despite the difference of shape, they held the same deep liquidity of his mother's eyes.
The whole face, he fancied, was that of a mother—a madonna. The live brown hair was smoothed back from a high forehead, with the simplicity of a Grecian maiden; there was just a hint of pallor in her complexion, whose whisper of lack of health was negatived by glowing cheeks and sparkling face. It was not the typically thin-visaged Italian madonna; it was this sublimated into an ampler shapeliness of feature. The voice was clear and direct, with the lingering overtones of a gong quietly tapped in still dusk. Her presence was restful, comforting, and at the same time embodied an unmistakable challenge to his own nature and worthiness.
The impression of childish naïveté, he soon found, must not be stretched too far; her vision was astonishingly clear and comprehending, with a definiteness that at times almost amounted to dogmatism.
Her mention of long-time friendship for "'Thea" gave something to inquire about. "You'll be at her table Saturday evening?"
"At the club, you mean? I hardly think so," and she smiled softly.
"Don't you dance?"
"Yes.... But not often. To be quite frank, the people one meets at the country club are rather banal ... even Dorothy's friends."
"Thank you! That's a touch. Perhaps you bridge."
"Sometimes I make a fourth; but cards are very easy to get absorbed in, to the point of obsession, don't you think?"
"I suppose so; if you take them that seriously. Are you fond of golf, or tennis?"