justice, the last to understand; and I'm not sure that, to the end--for
there was an end--she quite made it all out or knew where she was. When
you've been brought up for fifty years on black it must be hard to adjust
your organism at a day's notice to gold-colour. Her whole nature had
been pitched in the key of her supposed plainness. She had known how to
be ugly--it was the only thing she had learnt save, if possible, how not
to mind it. Being beautiful took in any case a new set of muscles. It
was on the prior conviction, literally, that she had developed her
admirable dress, instinctively felicitous, always either black or white
and a matter of rather severe squareness and studied line. She was
magnificently neat; everything she showed had a way of looking both old
and fresh; and there was on every occasion the same picture in her draped
head--draped in low-falling black--and the fine white plaits (of a
painter's white, somehow) disposed on her chest. What had happened was
that these arrangements, determined by certain considerations, lent
themselves in effect much better to certain others. Adopted in mere shy
silence they had really only deepened her accent. It was singular,
moreover, that, so constituted, there was nothing in her aspect of the
ascetic or the nun. She was a good hard sixteenth-century figure, not
withered with innocence, bleached rather by life in the open. She was in
short just what we had made of her, a Holbein for a great Museum; and our
position, Mrs. Munden's and mine, rapidly became that of persons having
such a treasure to dispose of. The world--I speak of course mainly of
the art-world--flocked to see it.




CHAPTER IV