lower lip full at the corners, her eyes large, calm and
vague, with fine well-marked eyebrows. She had a graceful chin, a
pretty throat, an undeveloped figure, no hips; her hands were large
and a little red, with prominent veins. Anything would make her blush,
and her girlish charm was all in the forehead and the chin. Her eyes
were always asking and dreaming, but said little.

Her father's preference was for her, just as her mother was drawn
towards the son by natural affinity. Without thinking much about it,
Clerambault had always monopolised his daughter, surrounding her from
childhood with his absorbing affection. She had been partly educated
by him, and with the almost offensive simplicity of the artist mind,
he had taken her for the confidante of his inner life. This was
brought about by his overflowing self-consciousness, and the little
response that he found in his wife, a good creature, who, as the
saying is, sat at his feet, in fact stayed there permanently,
answering yes to all that he said, admiring him blindly, without
understanding him, or feeling the lack; the essential to her was not
her husband's thought but himself, his welfare, his comfort, his food,
his clothing, his health. Honest Clerambault in the gratitude of his
heart did not criticise his wife, any more than Rosine criticised her
mother, but both of them knew how it was, instinctively, and were
drawn closer by a secret tie. Clerambault was not aware that in his
daughter he had found the real wife of his heart and mind. Nor did he
begin to suspect it, till in these last days the war had seemed to
break the tacit accord between them. Rosine's approval hitherto had
bound her to him, and now all at once it failed him. She knew many
things before he did, but shrank from the depths of the mystery; the
mind need not give warning to the heart, it knows.

Strange, splendid mystery of love between souls, independent of social
and even of natural laws. Few there be that know it, and fewer still
that dare to reveal it; they are afraid of the coarse world and its
summary judgments and can get no farther than the plain meaning
of traditional language. In this conventional tongue, which is
voluntarily inexact for the sake of social simplification, words are
careful not to unveil, by expressing them, the many shades of reality
in its multiple forms. They imprison it, codify it, drill it; they
press it into the service of the mind already domesticated; of tha