Ross seemed to meditate.
"I doubt," he said at last, "if it be profitable to anatomise magic; but if I must satisfy your inquiring turn of mind, I would hazard that it was the presence of two conflicting strains in Norah that fascinated the senses.
At some time you must have visited the Small Cat House at the Zoo? Those drowsy, furry, definite, little entities. A trifle sensual, a trifle cruel. Lazy, individualistic, practical, wicked, fascinating. Small, pointed faces, red tongues, sharp claws, sudden motions, quick wits.... Behind the prettiness and softness something lurks, something of the night, of the wilds.
Well, there was a quality in Norah that provoked one to the same admiration. When you listened to her deep, caressing voice—as deep a voice as I've heard in a woman, (some undergraduate once compared it to the dusk of a summer's day)—you were in the presence of something as strange and as primordial as the dances of the East.
Or when you glanced discreetly (should you be a foreigner, 'when you stared admiringly') at the elusive line of her face, which fined down to that evanescent oval, common enough in Italy, so light, so feminine, or should I say 'so female,' you were aware of something ... well, there isn't a fair word. To describe by opposites it certainly was not spiritual. But neither was it animal. Perhaps 'Southern' is as good an adjective as any. Not that she could really trace any meridional blood. If the Cleverlies went to the Continent for their mistresses, they stuck to the Shires for their wives. But unless you are satisfied by a wave of the hand towards the Small Cat House, 'Southern' is as good an adjective as I can find you.
Then, when you thought you had her classified, you met the second strain. Your ears lost her voice, your gaze left the line of cheek and chin and travelled to her narrow eyes, dark as night before sunrise, as a velvet curtain hiding a smouldering fire; at once you passed to the presence of a different animal.
The Small Cats don't bother their heads about romance, adventure, rebellion or any generous folly. I doubt if any occupant of the Zoo does; for that look you must search the human prisons.
But Norah's eyes made you remember forlorn hopes, lost causes, desperate adventures, despairing loyalties; all that uncomfortable side of life which the prudent man avoids. And when they gazed at you under their arched, delicate brows, you felt admiration or pity according to your lights, for a fellow mortal, spurred by impractical generosities, dazzled by romantic imaginings, ridden by rebellious longings, who'd funk no fence that Life might offer—Life isn't only fences," broke off Ross to mutter. "It's the plough that kills the likes of her."
"Dick Ward," he went on, "was gazing, no doubt, into those romantic orbs at the minute my story begins, and reading a flattering message in their courageous depths.
One could not look at Dick without pleasure. He presented a Lucifer-son-of-the-morning effect.