“Oh, Deirdre, don’t talk like that. It sounds as if you were daring Fate.”
So I was. I had always thought of Fate as she had been represented to me in a queer book of fancies and fables by a sardonic old French author.
“Fate is an old hag with a basket full of painted apples. She hands you out one, and you are so foolish as to take it, and when you bite it and find it rotten she smiles grimly and says, ‘I told you so’ (though she had not). And when you don’t like the taste of the paint she says, ‘But you must eat it to the core. Perhaps it will taste better there.’ (But it does not.)”
A Fate like that ought to be defied, and I felt sure that if every one did so she could never harm them. Tragedy is in us, and not in externals: Emerson says so. I refused to be a tragedy.
I laughed at Fate, and considered my complexion. Like everything about me it was unusual. It had a rich cream tint that blended perfectly with my wallflower eyes and hair. My mother arranged my colouring for me before I was born. She had a passion for reds and browns and ambers, and ardently desired to have a daughter with such colouring, so for all the months before I was born she used to have her rooms heaped with marigolds and wallflowers and nasturtiums and sit amongst them. People said she was a crazy American woman, full of eccentric ideas and notions, and perhaps she was; but she got what she wanted. For the velvet reds and browns and ambers of those simple but lovely flowers did reproduce themselves in my eyes and hair—at least every one said so—and the tint was in my skin, too, in an indescribable sort of way, and the effect was not at all unbecoming to my small, narrow, and extremely retroussé face. Did I ever say that every single thing about me turns upwards?—my chin, nose, cheekbones, lips—all have that curly, odd, rather fascinating upward tilt, and every single hair on my head turns up at the ends. Yes, I am very retroussé. Of course, I don’t say that it is pretty; but it is rather original I think.
After all, the sun had not done my skin so much harm as I thought. Indeed, I had often been in worse case after a week on the river, or a day’s hunting in hard weather, and thought nothing of it. As for my eyes and hair, “Time with her cold wing” might some day wither them, but Africa had certainly done them no harm so far. However, I decided to anoint myself in a royal manner with cold cream, and take a full day’s rest. Incidentally, I unpacked my war-paint and plumes, and shook the creases from my coats of mail.