With the lady's departure an air of wontedness seemed to repossess the
room, and the two people who were left. Things fell into their places,
one could observe relative beauty, on the walls and on the floor, in
Alicia's hair and in her skirt. Little meanings attached themselves--to
oval portraits of ladies, evidently ancestral, whose muslin sleeves were
tied with blue ribbon, to Byzantine-looking Persian paintings, to odd
brass bowls and faint-coloured embroideries. The air became full of
agreeable exhalations traceable to inanimate objects, or to a rose in
a vase of common country glass; and if one turned to Alicia one could
almost observe the process by which they were absorbed in her and given
forth again with a delicacy more vague. Lindsay sometimes thought of the
bee, and flowers and honey, but always abandoned the simile as a
trifle gross and material. Certainly as she sat there in her grace and
slenderness and pale clear tints--there was an effect of early
morning about her that made the full tide of other women's sunlight
vulgar--anyone would have been fastidious in the choice of a figure to
present her in. With a suspicion of haughtiness she was drawn for the
traditional marchioness; but she lifted her eyes and you saw that she
appealed instead. There was an art in the doing of her hair, a dainty
elaboration that spoke of the most approved conventions beneath, yet it
was impossible to mistake the freedom of spirit that lay in the lines of
her blouse. Even her gracefulness ran now and then into a downrightness
of movement which suggested the assertion of a primitive sincerity in a
personal world of many effects. Into her making of tea, for example, she
put nothing more sophisticated than sugar, and she ordered more bread
and butter in the worst possible rendering of her servants' tongue,
without a thought except that the bread and butter should be brought.
Lindsay liked to think that with him she was particularly simple
and direct, that he was of those who freed her from the pretty
consciousness, the elegant restraint that other people fixed upon her.