She remembered once when she and Matilda had been eating lunch at a Lyons popular café, Matilda had said:
"My! Kitten, there's such a strange-looking young man sitting behind you—Whatever makes him look quite different to everyone else?"
And she had turned and perceived that a pure Greek Hermes in rather shabby modern American clothes was manipulating a toothpick within a few feet of her—and her eye, trained from museum study, had instantly seen that it was the balance of proportion, the set and size of the head, and the angle of placing of eyes which differentiated him so startlingly from the mass of humanity surrounding them. She had said to Matilda:
"You had better look at him well, Tild—You will never see such another in the whole of your life. He is a freak, a perfect survival of the ancient Greek type. He is exactly right and not strange-looking really. It is all the other people who are wrong and clumsy or grotesque."
She thought of this now. The Duke stood out from everyone else in the same way, although he was not of pure Greek type, but much more Roman, but there was that astonishing proportion of bone and length of limb about him, the acknowledged yet indescribable shape of a thoroughbred, which middle age had not diminished, but rather accentuated.
She again noticed his hands, and his great emerald ring—but she did not reply at all to his announcement of his intentions for the morrow. She bent down and picked up a piece of music which had fallen to the floor, and Julia Scarrisbrooke swooped and caught her prey and carried it off into safety on a big sofa.
But as Katherine gazed from her window on that Good Friday night up into the deep blue star-studded sky, a feeling of awe came over her—at the magnitude of the vista fate was opening in front of her eyes.