She was still young—still brown-haired—still impulsive. He held her at arm’s length—Still in love with Eustace! He could see that: no woman remains so young who is not in love.
“Marcus, Marcus, you dear funny old thing!”
“Why funny?” he asked, gently disengaging himself from her arms; “let me look at you again.”
With a feeling of apprehension he knew to be absurd, he looked again, gaining courage as he looked. Had he overestimated the youthfulness of her appearance? Did not her pallor detract just a little from the radiance that had been her greatest beauty? Had he missed wrinkles? Yes, one or two—finely drawn, put in with a light hand, emphasizing only the passage of smiles—nothing more. If she had lost anything in looks she had gained much in expression. He might have left the blinds up. Her eyes were large. There were women he knew whose eyes got smaller as they grew older; that he could not have borne. Sibyl’s eyes were just as they had always been. They had lost naturally something of their look of childlike questioning. That he did not mind. The childlike woman he had long ceased to admire. He read here true womanliness; a depth of real understanding, and a certain knowledge of the big things in life—things that mattered.
“Sit down,” he said, and he drew her down on to the sofa beside him. “She looked like a rose, did she?”
“My Diana?”
Marcus nodded. “Pillar saw her.”
“Did he say she looked like a rose? Well, then it must have been very evident.”
“Not necessarily,” said Marcus, unconsciously championing Pillar. Not that he altogether trusted Pillar’s taste. He had shown in the Louvre, Marcus remembered, a weakness for Rubens’s women. He might have admired the consummate technique of a great master while deploring a certain coarseness in his choice of subjects, but he had not done so—
“Is she pretty?” asked Marcus.