"Your father and you are not sympathetic," she judged acutely. "He is
practical, solid; but it isn't easy to say, even with an explanation,
what you are. In London--but I'm sick of London. Myrtle Forge. It's
appalling at night. I'd like to go into the real wilderness, leave off
my hoops and stays, and bathe in a stream; a water nymph and you ... but
that's only Watteau again, with a cicisbeo holding my shift and
stockings. In London you'd be that, a lady's servant of love; but, in
the Province, I wonder?"

He sat half comprehending her words mingling in his brain with the
pounding of the trip hammer at the Forge, one familiar and one
unfamiliar yet not strange sound. Above them, on the lawn, he could see
Myrtle--through the middle of the day the sun had increased its
warmth--with skirts like the petals of a fabulous tea rose. The sun
glinted on the living gold of her hair and bathed an arm white as snow.
David was there no doubt. His thoughts dwelt for a moment on Caroline,
then returned to Mrs. Winscombe, to himself. His entire attitude toward
her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air
of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch
of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication,
her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on
shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly
thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him
involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses she had
evoked in him the night before. His instinct for preservation from any
entanglements with life lay dormant before her surrender to influences
that left her crumpled, without the slightest interest in any exterior
fact.

A sententious black servant in maroon livery and a bright worsted