Mabel leaned over and spoke to me, whereupon I sank again into the chair I had previously occupied. She began to chat, but although her beautiful eyes held me fixed, and her face seemed more handsome than any I had ever seen, the diamonds in her hair dazzled my eyes, and I fear that my responses were scarcely intelligible.
“You are not quite yourself to-night, I think,” she remarked at last, rising from the piano, and taking the low chair that I drew up for her. “Are you unwell?”
“Why?” I asked, laughing.
“Because you look rather pale. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” I answered, as carelessly as I could. “A slight headache. But it has passed now.”
My eyes wandered to those curtains of green plush. How I longed to enter that room beyond!
At that moment she took out her handkerchief. Even that action added to the completion of the mental picture I had formed. Her tiny square of lawn and lace exhaled a sweet odour. It was that of peau d’Espagne, the same subtle perfume used by the mysterious Edna! It filled my nostrils until I seemed intoxicated by its fragrance combined with her beauty.
Her dress was discreetly decolleté, and as she sat chatting to me with that bright vivaciousness which was so charming, her white neck slowly heaved and fell. She had, it seemed, been striving all the evening to get a tête-à-tête chat with me, but the chatter of that dreadful Irritating Woman and the requests made by Hickman had prevented her.
As she gossiped with me, now and then waving her big feather fan, she conveyed to my mind an impression of extreme simplicity in the midst of the most wonderful complexity. She seemed to take the peculiar traits from many characters, and so mingle them that, like the combination of hues in a sunbeam, the effect was as one to the eye. I had studied her carefully each time we had met, and had found that she had something of the romantic enthusiasm of a Juliet, of the truth and constancy of a Helen, of the dignified purity of an Isabel, of the tender sweetness of a Viola, of the self-possession and intellect of a Portia—combined together so equally and so harmoniously that I could scarcely say that one quality predominated over the other. Her dignity was imposing, and stood rather upon the defensive; her submission, though unbounded, was not passive, and thus she stood wholly distinct in her sweetness from any woman I had ever met.
The following day was one on which she was due to take her music-lesson, and I inquired whether I might, as usual, meet her and escort her across the Park.