These last words were addressed to Mills specially, with the
addition of a mumbled remark: "It's a confounded position." Then
calmly to me with a swift smile: "We have been talking of you this
morning. You are expected with impatience."
"Thank you very much," I said, "but I can't help asking myself what
I am doing here."
The upward cast in the eyes of Mills who was facing the staircase
made us both, Blunt and I, turn round. The woman of whom I had
heard so much, in a sort of way in which I had never heard a woman
spoken of before, was coming down the stairs, and my first
sensation was that of profound astonishment at this evidence that
she did really exist. And even then the visual impression was more
of colour in a picture than of the forms of actual life. She was
wearing a wrapper, a sort of dressing-gown of pale blue silk
embroidered with black and gold designs round the neck and down the
front, lapped round her and held together by a broad belt of the
same material. Her slippers were of the same colour, with black
bows at the instep. The white stairs, the deep crimson of the
carpet, and the light blue of the dress made an effective
combination of colour to set off the delicate carnation of that
face, which, after the first glance given to the whole person, drew
irresistibly your gaze to itself by an indefinable quality of charm
beyond all analysis and made you think of remote races, of strange
generations, of the faces of women sculptured on immemorial
monuments and of those lying unsung in their tombs. While she
moved downwards from step to step with slightly lowered eyes there
flashed upon me suddenly the recollection of words heard at night,
of Allegre's words about her, of there being in her "something of
the women of all time."
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