'In short, she's a cross between the Venus of Milo and the Madonna.'
Mrs Gildea was smiling amusedly.
'Perhaps.... Something of that sort. Dignity and sweetness, you know—those are what I admire in a woman. But not too much of the goddess or of the angel either. I shouldn't want always to have to load up with a pedestal when we shifted camp, and the only shrine I'd keep going for her would be in my heart. It's a Mate I'm wanting, as well as an Ideal.... Now you're laughing again.'
'No, I'm not. I agree with you entirely—and so would SHE.'
'There! You needn't tell me. I shouldn't wonder if I'd got the second sight where SHE'S concerned.'
Again Mrs Gildea smiled enigmatically.
'I shouldn't wonder, Colin. But you haven't finished your personal description. What about the colour of her eyes?'
'Now I don't believe I could say exactly the colour of her eyes any more than of her hair. They're the kind, to me, that have no colour. Soft and melting and sort of mysterious—Deep and clear and with a light far down in them like starlight reflected in a still lagoon.... I say, Joan, you remember the old Eight Mile Water-hole on Dingo Flat—middle of the patch of flooded gum and she-oak—that the Blacks used to say had no bottom to it? HER eyes seemed to me a bit like that water-hole—No bottom to her possibilities.'
'That's true enough,' assented Mrs Gildea. 'There's no bottom to HER possibilities.'
'I could tell it from her letter. She seemed to write flippantly about things—but that was just because she hates insincerity and flummery, and the world she lives in doesn't satisfy her. Why, it was as if I read slick through to her soul. That woman would go through anything for a man she really loved.'