“Oh, in the lavender garden?”
“She took me there this morning. The rose hedge is very tall now, and the rose leaves were dropping down on to the sundial”—he stretched up his arm—“from a height like this, above it.”
“Yes. Fairholme Court is the most beautiful place in the neighbourhood. Certainly the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”
There was a moment’s pause, during which Mrs. Dakin glanced towards the sofa, to which Anne had returned.
Her green and lavender gown fell in graceful folds round her feet. Against the cushions of dim purple at her back, her hair shone with a sort of moon-lit radiance. The poise of her head, the smile that wavered constantly near her sweet mouth, the radiance of her blue eyes, above all a certain dignity, too gentle to be quite stately, yet suggesting stateliness, made her a lovely and a gracious figure.
“Do you know,” said Mrs. Dakin, suddenly, “what surprises me is that the people who knew her long ago, when she first came here, scarcely remember her. They say, ‘Oh, she was a quiet creature. Very shy. We scarcely noticed her. She was just Mrs. Burbage’s companion.’ Things like that, you know. It has often disappointed me. I should have thought she must have been so beautiful as a younger woman.”
“She was always beautiful,” said her companion, quietly, “to those who had eyes to see. But she has learnt to use her beauty. She had first to learn that she possessed it. That took her a long time.” Again he smiled his odd little smile of reminiscence. “They are quite right when they say that she was shy. There are many people in the world, madame, who could be beautiful if they knew how. Beauty, the truest beauty, is an art. A subtle blend of many powers, mental and moral, which result in a mastery of the physical qualities. A knowledge of them, a perfect handling, a moulding of them to the ideal of the spirit. Do you remember what your critic Pater, says of Mona Lisa? It is a well-known passage, but it expresses what I am trying to say so poorly, so inadequately.”
Mrs. Dakin shook her head. “I’m a very ignorant person,” she said, with an embarrassed laugh.
“He is speaking of the portrait—which is lovely, according to the spirit rather than the flesh, and he says, ‘It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries, and exquisite passions.’”
Mrs. Dakin wrinkled her forehead. The last words shocked her a little. Her plea of ignorance was a true one in every sense of the word. It was the plea of a woman who had passed most of her life with ordinary conventional people, as oblivious to the complexities of human life as to the world of ideas in art, in philosophy, in all the realms invaded by human thought and emotion.