displacement of its foundations, and in its untrimmed luxuriance
half hid the upper veranda from his view.

Still glowing with his exertion, the young man rang the bell and
was admitted into a fair-sized drawing-room, whose tasteful and
well-arranged furniture at once prepossessed him. An open piano, a
sheet of music carelessly left on the stool, a novel lying face
downwards on the table beside a skein of silk, and the distant
rustle of a vanished skirt through an inner door, gave a suggestion
of refined domesticity to the room that touched the fancy of the
homeless and nomadic Bly. He was still enjoying, in half
embarrassment, that vague and indescribable atmosphere of a refined
woman's habitual presence, when the door opened and the mistress of
the house formally presented herself.

She was a faded but still handsome woman. Yet she wore that
peculiar long, limp, formless house-shawl which in certain phases
of Anglo-Saxon spinster and widowhood assumes the functions of the
recluse's veil and announces the renunciation of worldly vanities
and a resigned indifference to external feminine contour. The most
audacious masculine arm would shrink from clasping that shapeless
void in which the flatness of asceticism or the heavings of passion
might alike lie buried. She had also in some mysterious way
imported into the fresh and pleasant room a certain bombaziny
shadow of the past, and a suggestion of that appalling reminiscence
known as "better days." Though why it should be always represented
by ashen memories, or why better days in the past should be
supposed to fix their fitting symbol in depression in the present,
Mr. Bly was too young and too preoccupied at the moment to
determine. He only knew that he was a little frightened of her,