ntioning no names.

'I should say the portrait is correct. A want of spirituality,' Rosamund
said critically, using one of the insular commonplaces, after that
manner of fastening upon what there is not in a piece of Art or nature.

Cecilia's avidity to see and study the face preserved her at a higher
mark.

She knew the person instantly; had no occasion to ask who this was. She
sat over the portrait blushing burningly: 'And that is a brother?' she
said.

'That is her brother Roland, and very like her, except in complexion,'
said Rosamund.

Cecilia murmured of a general resemblance in the features. Renee
enchained her. Though but a sun-shadow, the vividness of this French
face came out surprisingly; air was in the nostrils and speech flew from
the tremulous mouth. The eyes? were they quivering with internal light,
or were they set to seem so in the sensitive strange curves of the
eyelids whose awakened lashes appeared to tremble on some borderland
between lustreful significance and the mists? She caught at the nerves
like certain aoristic combinations in music, like tones of a stringed
instrument swept by the wind, enticing, unseizable. Yet she sat there at
her father's feet gazing out into the world indifferent to spectators,
indifferent even to the common sentiment of gracefulness. Her left hand
clasped his right, and she supported herself on the floor with the other
hand leaning away from him, to the destruction of conventional symmetry
in the picture. None but a woman of consummate breeding dared have
done as she did. It was not Southern suppleness that saved her from the
charge of harsh audacity, but something of the kind of genius in her
mood which has hurried the greater poets of sound and speech to impose
their naturalness upon accepted laws, or show the laws to have been our
meagre limitations.

The writer in this country will, however, be made safest, and the
excellent body of self-appointed thongmen, who walk up and down our
ranks flapping their leathern straps to terrorize us from experiments
in imagery, will best be satisfied, by the statement that she was
indescribable: a term that exacts no labour of mind from him or from
them, for it flows off the pen as readily as it fills a vacuum.

That posture of Renee displeased Cecilia and fascinated her. In an
exhibition of paintings she would have passed by it in pure displeasure:
but here was Nevil's first love, the woman who loved him; and she
was Fren