wonder of a magic wood, might well have been like this, or of a nymph's
bathing by moonlight in some very secret pool. But a Dryad would not
have touched her lips with this vermilion, a nymph have painted beneath
her laughing eyes these cloudy shadows, or drawn above them these
artfully delicate lines. And the weariness that lay about these cheeks,
and at the corners of this mouth, suggested no early world, no goddesses
in the springtime of creation, but an existence to distress a moralist,
and a lack of pleasure in it to dishearten an honest pagan. The ideality
in Mrs. Chepstow's face was contradicted, was set almost at defiance, by
something--it was difficult to say exactly what; perhaps by the faint
wrinkles about the corners of her large and still luminous blue eyes, by
a certain not yet harsh prominence of the cheek-bones, by a slight droop
of the lips that hinted at passion linked with cynicism. There was a
suggestion of hardness somewhere. Freshness had left this face, but not
because of age. There are elderly, even old women who look almost
girlish, fragrant with a charm that has its root in innocence of life.
Mrs. Chepstow did not certainly look old. Yet there was no youth in her,
no sweetness of the girl she once had been. She was not young, nor old,
nor definitely middle-aged.

She was definitely a woman who had strung many experiences upon the
chain of her life, yet who, in certain aspects, called up the thought
of, even the desire for, things ideal, things very far away from all
that is sordid, ugly, brutal, and defaced.

The look of pride, or perhaps of self-respect, which Doctor Isaacson had
seen born as if in answer to his detrimental thought of her, stayed in
this face, which was turned towards the light.

He realized that in this woman there was much will, perhaps much