* * *
As she goes the women put away their handkerchiefs, for they have all been crying a little, some with joy and some out of the depths of knowledge.
To all of them standing there She represented That Which Once Was, That Which Might Have Been, That Which May Be; and something more—oh, much more. For that brief second she was the Ideal. She was Happiness.
I think also that when the older women found themselves in tears they were seeing through a glass darkly, through the glass of this girl's life, and in their hearts they knew that, come weal, come woe, they had seen a sister at the pinnacle of her life.
* * *
"Good luck, my dear!"
Kings and Queens
Nell Gwynne must have had some trying moments. When she fell into a red-haired woman's rage facing Charles II with clenched hands, Charles probably stood there looking at her just as he looks at the few people who from time to time gaze at him in the Westminster Abbey waxwork show.
Women hate to be looked at like that, whether the man who looks is a king or is merely someone else's husband. "Now, Nelly!" he seems to be saying. "Now, Nelly!" Cold, distant, on the apex of his pyramid of superiority, with his sallow, cynical face framed in its cascade of curls, how mad he must have made her—and all the others—for women who permit themselves hysterics do detest having them against a human granite quarry. That sad, superior Stuart eye, that heavy, drooping mouth, that thin, supercilious pencil line of a moustache etched straight over, but a little above, his upper lip. So contemptuous, so cutting, so sarcastic. You can positively hear the dead beauties saying, "Charles, I never know what you are really thinking," or "Charles, do smile, just once," or "Charles, dearest, why do you look at me like that? Have you forgotten...." Heart-rending for them, but—also attractive, you know!