"Oh, love's but a dance,
Where time plays the fiddle."
I.
She was constitutionally a matchmaker, and though recognising the infirmity was not without its advantages, I refused to be made an accessory after the fact. I declined to lend myself to the introduction of my best masculine friend, Lorraine, to my best feminine one, Clair Conway. There was no petty jealousy at bottom of the dissent, for sixty winters had rolled over this philosophic head; it was merely that I shirked the responsibility of meddling with Fate.
But my sister, Sarah Sargent, had no such qualms. "Matchmaker!" she exclaimed. "Perhaps so—a woman without romance is like an exotic without scent; and what woman could know a lovely girl, and a man who is intellectually gifted and eligible to boot, without planning to introduce them?"
About Clair Conway's beauty there admitted little dispute, though it was complex to apprehend. Every feature was in drawing, but nowhere arrogantly classical. A faint scumbling, which poets might have described as the mists of youth's Aurora, endowed the face with a soothing indefinitude. In effect, it acted like dew on summer turf which drapes the emerald crispness in silver sheen. The only obvious irregularity was a contumacious tooth which peeped impertinently over the centre of the lower lip, dimpling its fulness with a tiny shadow. In that dimple lurked the most fascinating lisp that was ever modelled—a lisp not sufficiently full-bodied to disturb the accent, but strong minded enough to put stress upon it. Her figure was in the bud. It had small natural curves, which hinted at feminality, but it was fitted far too well; the tailor had forced a masculine exactness which was foreign to the subject and to the statuesque creasings of her neck.
To me from her youth she had always been a centre of interest. She was like some half-studied volume of belles lettres—full of temptations, subtleties, prose melodies, poetic realisms. Her speech was fragile, and her words, subdued by their passage through the dimple, lagged now and then. Her expression was seldom either animated or pensive; never did green and yellow melancholy chase the vermeil from her cheek, seldom did excitement heighten it. She was as serene as innocence and as clean-eyed, the very woman I would have worshipped had youth quickened in my veins.
"I knew Philip would admire her," my sister related, when describing the kettledrum she had given in furtherance of her scheme, "so I introduced them at once!"
"Lorraine's fancies are protean, my good Sarah. They are the result of appreciative faculty. Someone—I think Emerson—says that 'love is a mutual perception of the same truth,' or something to that effect. Unfortunately, as the artist soul is always in pursuit of new truths, the deduction is perilous."
"But," argued she, "Clair is the white light of truth itself. One might go about studying nuances, contrasting tones, and yet value that truth eternally. I expected Mr Lorraine would appreciate her for this reason. He is a colour theorist, and with his knowledge of values he can gauge the true beauty of white light."
"Well, and the result?" I questioned, with interest; for I myself had seen him spy out Clair from among crowds of women, watched his eyes lean on her, on the picturesque brim of her hat and the curling feathers which insinuated themselves against the contour of her transparent ear, but had afterwards escaped to avoid participation in Sarah's plot.