intervolved them
in vibrating unison. Only to look at her face, without hearing her voice,
without the charm of her speech, was to feel it. On Cecilia's entering
the drawing-room sofa, while the gentlemen drank claret, Rosamund handed
her the card of the photographic artist of Tours, mentioning 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 o