“Who was she?”
De Moulny stuck his chin out, and stated in his didactic way:
“She was the type of jeune personne of whom my grandmother would have approved.”
“A young girl!” grumbled Hector, who at this period esteemed the full-blown peony of womanhood above the opening rosebud. He shrugged one shoulder so contemptuously that de Moulny was nettled.
“One might say to you, ‘There are young girls and young girls.’”
“This one was charming, then?” Hector’s waning interest began to burn up again.
“Certainly, no! For,” said de Moulny authoritatively, “to be charming you must desire to charm. This young girl was innocent of any thought of coquetry. And—if you ask me whether she was beautiful, I should give you again the negative. Beauty—the beauty of luxuriant hair, pale, silken brown, flowing, as a young girl’s should, loosely upon shoulders rather meager; the beauty of an exquisite skin, fresh, clear, burned like a nectarine on the oval cheeks where the sun had touched it; beauty of eyes, those English eyes of blue-gray, more lustrous than brilliant, banded about the irises with velvety black, widely opened, thickly lashed—these she possessed, with features much too large for beauty, with a form too undeveloped even to promise grace. But the quality or force that marked her out, distinguished her from others of her age and sex, I have no name for that!”
“No?” Hector, not in the least interested, tried to look so, and apparently succeeded. De Moulny went on:
“No!—nor would you. Suppose you had met the Venerable Jeanne d’Arc in her peasant kirtle, driving her sheep or cows to pasture in the fields about Domremy in the days before her Voices spoke and said: ‘Thou, Maid, art destined to deliver France!’ Or—what if you had seen the Virgins of the Temple at Jerusalem pass singing on their way to the tribune surrounded with balconies, where while the Morning Sacrifice burned upon the golden Altar to the fanfare of the silver trumpets, they besought God Almighty, together with all Israel, for the speedy coming of the Saviour of mankind.... Would not One among them, draped in her simple robe of hyacinth blue, covered with the white, plainly-girdled tunic, a veil of Syrian gauze upon her golden hair, have brought you the conviction that She, above all the women you had ever seen, was destined, marked out, set apart, created to serve a peculiar purpose of her Creator, stamped with His stamp——”
The hard blue eyes, burning now, encountered Hector’s astonished gape, and their owner barked out: “What are you opening your mouth so wide about?”