She wore a long habit of silk, whose fur-trimmed edge wandered diagonally across her breast and down to the edge of her walking dress.
To Colville, whom her girlish slimness in her ball costume had puzzled after his original impressions of Junonian abundance, she did not so much dwindle as seem to vanish from the proportions his visions had a.s.signed her that first night when he saw her standing before the mirror. In this outdoor avatar, this companionship with the sun and breeze, she was new to him again, and he found himself searching his consciousness for his lost acquaintance with her, and feeling as if he knew her less and less. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very distinctive individuality; perhaps at her age no woman has, but waits for it to come to her through life, through experience. She was an expression of youth, of health, of beauty, and of the moral loveliness that comes from a fortunate combination of these; but beyond this she was elusive in a way that seemed to characterise her even materially. He could not make anything more of the mystery as he walked at her side, and he went thinking--formlessly, as people always think--that with the child or with her mother he would have had a community of interest and feeling which he lacked with this splendid girlhood! he was both too young and too old for it; and then, while he answered this or that to Imogene"s talk aptly enough, his mind went back to the time when this mystery was no mystery, or when he was contemporary with it, and if he did not understand it, at least accepted it as if it wore the most natural thing in the world. It seemed a longer time now since it had been in his world than it was since he was a child.
"Should you have thought," she asked, turning her face back toward him, "that it would be so hot in the sun to-day? _Oh_, that beautiful river!
How it twists and writhes along! Do you remember that sonnet of Longfellow"s--the one he wrote in Italian about the Ponte Vecchio, and the Arno twisting like a dragon underneath it? They say that Hawthorne used to live in a villa just behind the hill over there; we"re going to look it up as soon as the weather is settled. Don"t you think his books are perfectly fascinating?"
"Yes," said Colville; "only I should want a good while to say it."
"_I_ shouldn"t!" retorted the girl. "When you"ve said fascinating, you"ve said everything. There"s no other word for them. Don"t you like to talk about the books you"ve read?"
"I would if I could remember the names of the characters. But I get them mixed up."
"Oh, _I_ never do! I remember the least one of them, and all they do and say."
"I used to."
"It seems to me you _used_ to do everything."
"It seems to me as if I did."
""I remember, when I think, That my youth was half divine.""
"Oh, Tennyson--yes! _He"s_ fascinating. Don"t you think he"s fascinating?"
"Very," said Colville. He was wondering whether this were the kind of talk that he thought was literary when he was a young fellow.
"How perfectly weird the "Vision of Sin" is!" Imogene continued. "Don"t you like _weird_ things?"
"Weird things?" Colville reflected. "Yes; but I don"t see very much in them any more. The fact is, they don"t seem to come to anything in particular."
"Oh, _I_ think they do! I"ve had dreams that I"ve lived on for days. Do you ever have prophetic dreams?"
"Yes; but they never come true. When they do, I know that I didn"t have them."
"What _do_ you mean?"
"I mean that we are all so fond of the marvellous that we can"t trust ourselves about any experience that seems supernatural. If a ghost appeared to me I should want him to prove it by at least two other reliable, disinterested witnesses before I believed my own account of the matter."
"Oh!" cried the girl, half puzzled, half amused. "Then of course you don"t believe in ghosts?"
"Yes; I expect to be one myself some day. But I"m in no hurry to mingle with them."
Imogene smiled vaguely, as if the talk pleased her, even when it mocked the fancies and whims which, after so many generations that have indulged them, she was finding so fresh and new in her turn.
"Don"t you like to walk by the side of a river?" she asked, increasing her eager pace a little. "I feel as if it were bearing me along."
"I feel as if I were carrying it," said Colville. "It"s as fatiguing as walking on railroad ties."
"Oh, that"s too bad!" cried the girl. "How can you be so prosaic? Should you ever have believed that the sun could be so hot in January? And look at those ridiculous green hillsides over the river there! Don"t you like it to be winter when it _is_ winter?"
She did not seem to have expected anything from Colville but an impulsive acquiescence, but she listened while he defended the mild weather. "I think it"s very well for Italy," he said. "It has always seemed to me--that is, it seems to me now for the first time, but one has to begin the other way--as if the seasons here had worn themselves out like the turbulent pa.s.sions of the people. I dare say the winter was much fiercer in the times of the Bianchi and Neri."
"Oh, how delightful! Do you really believe that?"
"No, I don"t know that I do. But I shouldn"t have much difficulty in proving it, I think, to the sympathetic understanding."
"I wish you would prove it to mine. It sounds so pretty, I"m sure it must be true."
"Oh, then, it isn"t necessary. I"ll reserve my arguments for Mrs.
Bowen."
"You had better. She isn"t at all romantic. She says it"s very well for me she isn"t--that her being matter-of-fact lets me be as romantic as I like."
"Then Mrs. Bowen isn"t as romantic as she would like to be if she hadn"t charge of a romantic young lady?"
"Oh, I don"t say that. Dear me! I"d no idea it _could_ be so hot in January." As they strolled along beside the long hedge of laurel, the carriage slowly following them at a little distance, the sun beat strong upon the white road, blotched here and there with the black irregular shadows of the ilexes. The girl undid the pelisse across her breast, with a fine impetuosity, and let it swing open as she walked. She stopped suddenly. "Hark! What bird was that?"
""It was the nightingale, and not the lark,"" suggested Colville lazily.
"Oh, _don"t_ you think _Romeo and Juliet_ is divine?" demanded Imogene, promptly dropping the question of the bird.
"I don"t know about Romeo," returned Colville, "but it"s sometimes occurred to me that Juliet was rather forth-putting."
"You _know_ she wasn"t. It"s my favourite play. I could go every night.
It"s perfectly amazing to me that they can play anything else."
"You would like it five hundred nights in the year, like _Hazel Kirke_?
That would be a good deal of Romeo, not to say Juliet."
"They ought to do it out of respect to Shakespeare. Don"t you like Shakespeare?"
"Well, I"ve seen the time when I preferred Alexander Smith," said Colville evasively.
"Alexander Smith? Who in the world is Alexander Smith?"
"How recent you are! Alexander Smith was an immortal who flourished about the year 1850."
"That was before I was born. How could I remember him? But I don"t feel so very recent for all that."
"Neither do I, this morning," said Colville. "I was up at one of Pharaoh"s b.a.l.l.s last night, and I danced too much."
He gave Imogene a droll glance, and then bent it upon Effie"s discreet face. The child dropped her eyes with a blush like her mother"s, having first sought provisional counsel of Imogene, who turned away. He rightly inferred that they all had been talking him over at breakfast, and he broke into a laugh which they joined in, but Imogene said nothing in recognition of the fact.
With what he felt to be haste for his relief she said, "Don"t you hate to be told to read a book?"
"I used to--quarter of a century ago," said Colville, recognising that this was the way young people talked, even then.
"Used to?" she repeated. "Don"t you now?"