individually, strangely, as if in the clothes of an ancestress of the
seventeenth century. Well, at first I thought it a kind of pose on her
part, this mixture of extreme graciousness and utter indifference which she
manifested towards me. She always seemed to be thinking of something else;
and although she talked quite sufficiently, and with every sign of superior
intelligence, she left the impression of having been as taciturn as her
husband.

In the beginning, in the first few days of my stay at Okehurst, I imagined
that Mrs. Oke was a highly superior sort of flirt; and that her absent
manner, her look, while speaking to you, into an invisible distance, her
curious irrelevant smile, were so many means of attracting and baffling
adoration. I mistook it for the somewhat similar manners of certain foreign
women--it is beyond English ones--which mean, to those who can understand,
"pay court to me." But I soon found I was mistaken. Mrs. Oke had not the
faintest desire that I should pay court to her; indeed she did not honour
me with sufficient thought for that; and I, on my part, began to be too
much interested in her from another point of view to dream of such a thing.
I became aware, not merely that I had before me the most marvellously rare
and exquisite and baffling subject for a portrait, but also one of the most
peculiar and enigmatic of characters. Now that I look back upon it, I am
tempted to think that the psychological peculiarity of that woman might be
summed up in an exorbitant and absorbing interest in herself--a Narcissus
attitude--curiously complicated with a fantastic imagination, a sort of
morbid day-dreaming, all turned inwards, and with no outer characteristic
save a certain restlessness, a perverse desire to surprise and shock, to
surprise and shock more particularly her husband, and thus be revenged for
the intense boredom which his want of appreciation inflicted upon her.

I got to understand this much little by little, yet I did not seem to have