"Who? Dunellen? None that he has acknowledged."
"Then his daughter will come in for it all."
"That's what I said. When she does, she will probably hand it over to some man who wont know how to spend it. She's got a cousin—what's that beggar's name? However, he's a physician, makes a specialty of nervous diseases, I believe; good enough fellow in his way, but an everlasting bore—the sort of man you would avoid in a club, and trust your sister to. What the deuce is his name?"
"Well, what of him?"
"Ah, yes. I fancy he wants to get married, and when he does, to entertain. He is very devoted."
"But nowadays, barring royalty, no one ever marries a cousin."
"Dear boy, you forget; it isn't every cousin that has ten million. When she has, the attempt is invariable." And Jones accentuated his remark with a nod. "Now," he continued, "what do you say to a look at the library? They have a superb edition of Kirschwasser in there, and a full set of the works of Chartreuse."
The novelist had arisen; he was leaving the room, and Roland was about to follow him, when he noticed that Miss Dunellen was preparing to leave it too. Before she reached the hall he was at her side.
There is this about the New York girl—her beauty is often bewildering, yet unless a husband catch her in the nick of time the bewilderment of that beauty fades. At sixteen Justine Dunellen had been enchanting, at twenty-three she was plain. Her face still retained its oval, but from it something had evaporated and gone. Her mouth, too, had altered. In place of the volatile brilliance of earlier years, it was drawn a little; it seemed resolute, and it also seemed subdued. But one feature had not changed: her eyes, which were of the color of snuff, enchanted still. They were large and clear, and when you looked in them you saw such possibilities of tenderness and sincerity that the escape of the transient was unregretted; you forgot the girl that had been, and loved the woman that was.
And lovable she was indeed. The world is filled with charming people whom, parenthetically, many of us never meet; yet, however scant our list may be, there are moments when from Memory's gardens a vision issues we would fain detain. Who is there to whom that vision has not come? Nay, who is there that has not intercepted it, and, to the heart's perdition perhaps, suffered it to retreat? If there be any to whom such apparitions are unvouchsafed, let him evoke that woman whom he would like his sister to resemble and his wife to be. Then, if his intuitions are acute, there will appear before him one who has turned sympathy into a garment and taken refinement for a wreath; a woman just yet debonair, thoughtful of others, true to herself; a woman whose speech can weary no more than can a star, whose mind is clean as wholesome fruit, whose laugh is infrequent, and whose voice consoles; a woman who makes the boor chivalrous, and the chivalrous bend the knee. Such an one did Justine Dunellen seem. In person she was tall, slender, willowy of movement, with just that shrinking graciousness that the old masters gave to certain figures which they wished to represent as floating off the canvas into space.