quantity. The sole flaw in Ida's beauty was a length and reach of
arm conducive perhaps to her having so often beaten her ex-husband
at billiards, a game in which she showed a superiority largely
accountable, as she maintained, for the resentment finding expression
in his physical violence. Billiards was her great accomplishment
and the distinction her name always first produced the mention of.
Notwithstanding some very long lines everything about her that might
have been large and that in many women profited by the licence was,
with a single exception, admired and cited for its smallness. The
exception was her eyes, which might have been of mere regulation size,
but which overstepped the modesty of nature; her mouth, on the other
hand, was barely perceptible, and odds were freely taken as to the
measurement of her waist. She was a person who, when she was out--and
she was always out--produced everywhere a sense of having been seen
often, the sense indeed of a kind of abuse of visibility, so that it
would have been, in the usual places rather vulgar to wonder at her.
Strangers only did that; but they, to the amusement of the familiar,
did it very much: it was an inevitable way of betraying an alien
habit. Like her husband she carried clothes, carried them as a train
carries passengers: people had been known to compare their taste and
dispute about the accommodation they gave these articles, though
inclining on the whole to the commendation of Ida as less overcrowded,
especially with jewellery and flowers. Beale Farange had natural
decorations, a kind of costume in his vast fair beard, burnished like
a gold breastplate, and in the eternal glitter of the teeth that his
long moustache had been trained not to hide and that gave him, in
every possible situation, the look of the joy of life. He had been
destined in his youth for diplomacy and momentarily attached, without
a salary, to a legation which enabled him often to say "In MY time in
the East": but contemporary history had somehow had no use for him,