She was suddenly silent then, staring out ahead, her hands clutching the chair-arms.
To her inflamed fancy, it was as if, beyond the hedge, the old disused hitching-post had become incarnate and, in the form of her naive and horned conception, was coming toward her with the whites of his eyes bloodshot.
A PETAL ON THE CURRENT
Were I only swifter and more potent of pen, I could convey to you all in the stroke of a pestle the H2O, the pigment of the red-cheeked apple, the blue of long summer days, and the magnesia of the earth for which Stella Schump was the mortal and mortar receptacle.
She was about as exotic as a flowering weed which can spring so strongly and so fibrously from slack. And yet such a weed can bleed milk. If Stella Schump was about fourteen pounds too plump, too red of cheek, and too blandly blue of eye, there was the very milk of human kindness in her morning punching up of her mother's pillows and her smoothing down of the gray and poorly hair. She could make a bed freshly, whitely, her strong young arms manoeuvering under but not even jarring the poor old form so often prone there.
There was a fine kind of virile peasantry in the willing hands, white enough, but occasionally broken at the nails from eight hours of this box in and that box out in a children's shoe department.
Differing by the fourteen pounds, Watteau would have scorned and Rubens have adored to paint her.
She was not unconscious of the rather flaxen ripple of her hair, which she wore slickly parted and drawn back, scallop by scallop, to a round and shining mat of plaits against the back of her head. But neither was she unconscious that she thereby enhanced the too high pitch of her cheek-bones and the already too generous width between them. It was when Stella Schump opened wide her eyes that she transcended the milky fleshliness and the fact that, when she walked rapidly, her cheeks quivered in slight but gelatinous fashion. Her eyes—they were the color of perfect June at that high-noon moment when the spinning of the humming-bird can be distilled to sound. Laura and Marguerite and Stella Schump had eyes as blue as Cleopatra's, and Sappho's and Medea's must have been green.
For reading and occasional headaches, she wore a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles prescribed but not specially ground by the optical department, cater-corner from the children's shoes. Upon the occasion of their first adjustment, Romance, for the first time, had leaned briefly into the smooth monotony of Miss Schump's day-by-day, to waft a scented, a lace-edged, an elusive kerchief.
"You ought to heard, mamma, that fellow over in the specs, when he gimme the test for the glasses."