Matthias admired her greatly. Women, he knew--Helena in their number--mistrusted her for no cause perceptible to him. He liked her, thought her little less than absolutely charming. So, evidently, did Marbridge, whose attitude toward her this evening was a little more noticeably attentive than ever before. He seemed to exert himself to interest and divert. His black eyes snapped. As he talked his heavy body swayed slightly from the hips, lending an accent to his animation. His laugh was frequent and infectious.
She was a woman who smiled more than she laughed. She smiled now, inscrutably, her beautiful, insolent eyes half veiled with demure lashes, her face turned to Marbridge, her chin a trifle high, bringing out the clear strong lines of her throat and shoulders, which had the texture, the pallor, and the firmness of fine ivory. Her eyes, when she chose to discover them, were brown, her eyebrows almost black, her hair dull gold, the gold of the candelabrum--the gold of artifice, on the word of Helena.
Perhaps it was to this odd colouring--ivory and brown, black and gold--that Mrs. Cardrow owed most of her strange and provoking quality. But there was something else, something one could not define: at once stimulating and elusive; less charm than allure; nameless; that attracted and repelled....
These were thoughts set stirring by a dozen semi-curious glances at the woman, in pauses in his conversation with Venetia. Matthias was in fact indifferent to Mrs. Cardrow. But he was tremendously interested in Venetia. It could hardly be otherwise--since his talk with Helena. He was to marry Venetia. Amazing thought!
She was adorable. Of the other women, none compared with Mrs. Cardrow: even Helena's beauty paled in contrast. But Venetia was to Mrs. Cardrow as dawn to noon. One looked at Venetia and thought of a still sea at daybreak, mobile to the young and fitful airs, radiant with sunlight, breathless with apprehension of the long, golden hours to come. One looked at Mrs. Cardrow and thought--of Woman. Venetia was dark, and the other fair; Venetia was by no means a child, Mrs. Cardrow not yet thirty. The gulf that set them apart was not so much of years as of caste: they lived and thought on different levels, mental if not social. Matthias liked to think Venetia of the higher order.
