In other words let me get back to earth and, in regular language, try to describe her as I first saw her.
It was on the pier-head at Cannes: the time, sunset. She stood, outlined against the flaming sky, a tall, angular figure. In the fading light I took no note of details but there was that in the woman’s silhouette which gripped me. My heart stopped ... missed a beat ... and hurried on.
Strange and mysterious, the influence of human personalities! Her mere presence was a challenge at which I bristled. Through my nerve-centers flashed deep messages of interest, attraction ... animosity. Here, plainly, was no easy quarry.
As tense and alert as a setter on-the-point I stood watching the lean figure. At the back of my head I felt a light tickling sensation as if a hand had passed upward over my hair; my nostrils, I dare say, dilated.
Her back was toward me and she was gazing at the luminous waters of the “Baie des Anges.” Caught in her close-cropped, reddish-brown hair the last sun’s rays shone in a golden aureole so that in this respect she might have been one of the angels for whom the bay is named. But the angelic suggestion ended there. In all else she was warm, vital, human, a vibrant personality with a hint of almost masculine strength beneath the folds of her tan silk jacket and short walking skirt. One arm was akimbo and through the triangle thus formed I could see, by odd coincidence, the distant shape of my yawl, the Kawa, from which I had just landed.
LADY SARAH WIMPOLE
“Her mere presence was a challenge at which I bristled. Here was no easy quarry.”
