stateliness, a play of outline with every step she took, that I can't
compare to anything else; there was in it something of the peacock and
something also of the stag; but, above all, it was her own. I wish I could
describe her. I wish, alas!--I wish, I wish, I have wished a hundred
thousand times--I could paint her, as I see her now, if I shut my
eyes--even if it were only a silhouette. There! I see her so plainly,
walking slowly up and down a room, the slight highness of her shoulders;
just completing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straight
supple back, the long exquisite neck, the head, with the hair cropped in
short pale curls, always drooping a little, except when she would suddenly
throw it back, and smile, not at me, nor at any one, nor at anything that
had been said, but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something,
with the strange dimple in her thin, pale cheeks, and the strange whiteness
in her full, wide-opened eyes: the moment when she had something of the
stag in her movement. But where is the use of talking about her? I don't
believe, you know, that even the greatest painter can show what is the real
beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary sense: Titian's and
Tintoretto's women must have been miles handsomer than they have made them.
Something--and that the very essence--always escapes, perhaps because real
beauty is as much a thing in time--a thing like music, a succession, a
series--as in space. Mind you, I am speaking of a woman beautiful in the
conventional sense. Imagine, then, how much more so in the case of a woman
like Alice Oke; and if the pencil and brush, imitating each line and tint,
can't succeed, how is it possible to give even the vaguest notion with mere
wretched words--words possessing only a wretched abstract meaning, an
impotent conventional association? To make a long story short, Mrs. Oke of
Okehurst was, in my opinion, to the highest degree exquisite and
strange,--an exotic creature, whose charm you can no more describe than you
could bring home the perfume of some newly discovered tropical flower by
comparing it with the scent of a cabbage-rose or a lily.