"Would you mind turning a little more towards the light?"

She sat still for a minute, then she laughed.

"I have always said that so long as one is with a doctor, _qua_ doctor,
one must never think of him as a man," she said; "but--"

"Don't think of me as a man."

"Unfortunately, there is something about you which absolutely prevents
me from regarding you as a machine. But--never mind!"

She turned to the light, lifted her thin veil, and leaned towards him.

"Do you think I look ill?"

He gazed at her steadily, with a scrutiny that was almost cruel. The
face presented to him in the bold light that flowed in through the large
window near which their chairs were placed still preserved elements of
the beauty of which the world had heard too much. Its shape, like the
shape of Mrs. Chepstow's head, was exquisite. The line of the features
was not purely Greek, but it recalled things Greek, profiles in marble
seen in calm museums. The outline of a thing can set a sensitive heart
beating with the strange, the almost painful longing for an ideal life,
with ideal surroundings, ideal loves, ideal realizations. It can call to
the imagination that lies drowsing, yet full of life, far down in the
secret recesses of the soul. The curve of Mrs. Chepstow's face, the
modelling of her low brow, and the undulations of the hair that flowed
away from it--although, alas! that hair was obviously, though very
perfectly, dyed--had this peculiar power of summons, sent forth silently
this subtle call. The curve of a Dryad's face, seen dimly in the green
wonder of a magic wood, might well have been like this, or of a nymph's
bathing by moonlight in some very secret pool. But a Dryad would not
have touched her lips with this vermilion, a nymph have painted beneath
her laughing eyes these cloudy shadows, or drawn above them these
artfully delicate lines. And the weariness that lay about these cheeks,
and at the corners of this mouth, suggested no early world, no goddesses
in the springtime of creation, but an existence to distress a moralist,
and a lack of pleasure in it to dishearten an honest pagan. The ideality
in Mrs. Chepstow's face was contradicted, was set almost at defiance, by
something--it was difficult to say exactly what; perhaps by the faint
wrinkles about the corners of her large and still luminous blue eyes, by
a certain not yet harsh prominence of the cheek-bones, by a slight droop
of the lips that hinted at passion linked wi