There was a knock at the door. Woodville looked up. It was Sylvia.

Sylvia had that curious gift, abstract beauty, the sort of beauty that
recalls vaguely some ideal or antique memory. Hence, at various times
various people had remarked on her striking resemblance to Helen of
Troy, Cleopatra, Dante's Beatrice, the Venus of the Luxembourg, one of
Botticelli's angels, and La Giaconda!

Her head was purely Greek, her hair, fine in texture, and in colour
golden-brown, grew very low in thick ripples on a broad forehead. The
illusion of the remote or mythical was intensified by the symmetry of
her slim figure, by her spiritual eyes, and beautiful, Pagan mouth. Tall
and slender, her rounded arms and fine hands with their short pointed
fingers seemed to terminate naturally in anything she held, such as a
fan or flower, or fell in graceful curves in her lap. Sylvia had not the
_chiffonnee_ restless charm of the contemporary pretty woman; she did
not, like Felicity, arouse with stimulating intensity one's sense of the
modern.

Goddess, heroine, or angel she might be (her height, indeed, suggested
heaven rather than hockey). Her beauty was of other days, not of the
Summer Number. She was not, however, to do her justice, intentionally
picturesque. She did not "_go in for the artistic style_"; that is to
say, she did not part her hair and draw it over her ears, wear
oddly-shaped blouses and bead necklaces, and look absent. The iron had
obviously entered into her hair (or into every seventh wave, at least,
of her hair), and her dresses fitted her as a flower its sheath. She was
natural, but not in the least wild; no primrose by a river's brim, nor
an artificial bloom, but rather a hothouse flower just plucked and very
carefully wired. Hence she was at once the despair of the portrait
painters, who had never as yet been able to help making her look on
canvas like a bad Leighton in a Doucet dress, and the joy of the
photographers, who in her honour set aside their pillars and their
baskets of flowers, their curtains and their picture hats, being certain
that she would pose herself exquisitely, and that her lines were so
right that not even a photographer could improve on them.

Sylvia was so truly artistic in temperament and so extremely
unpractical that it was not surprising she made an admirable
housekeeper, having fortunately that inborn gift for organisation, and
for seeing things on the whole, that is so much more important i