Imprimis, there was not very much of her—five
feet three, at the most; and hers was the well-groomed
modern type that implies a grandfather or two and
is in every respect the antithesis of that hulking
Venus of the Louvre whom people pretend to admire.
Item, she had blue eyes; and when she talked with
you, her head drooped forward a little. The frank,
intent gaze of these eyes was very flattering and,
in its ultimate effect, perilous, since it led you
fatuously to believe that she had forgotten there
were any other trousered beings extant. Later
on you found this a decided error. Item, she had
a quite incredible amount of yellow hair, that was
not in the least like gold or copper or bronze—I
scorn the hackneyed similes of metallurgical poets—but
a straightforward yellow, darkening at the roots; and
she wore it low down on her neck in great coils that
were held in place by a multitude of little golden
hair-pins and divers corpulent tortoise-shell ones.
Item, her nose was a tiny miracle of perfection; and
this was noteworthy, for you will observe that Nature,
who is an adept at eyes and hair and mouths, very
rarely achieves a creditable nose. Item, she
had a mouth; and if you are a Gradgrindian with a
taste for hairsplitting, I cannot swear that it was
a particularly small mouth. The lips were rather
full than otherwise; one saw in them potentialities
of heroic passion, and tenderness, and generosity,
and, if you will, temper. No, her mouth was not
in the least like the pink shoe-button of romance
and sugared portraiture; it was manifestly designed
less for simpering out of a gilt frame or the dribbling
of stock phrases over three hundred pages than for
gibes and laughter and cheery gossip and honest, unromantic
eating, as well as another purpose, which, as a highly
dangerous topic, I decline even to mention.
There you have the best description of Margaret Hugonin
that I am capable of giving you. No one realises
its glaring inadequacy more acutely than I.
Furthermore, I stipulate that if in the progress of
our comedy she appear to act with an utter lack of
reason or even common-sense—as every woman
worth the winning must do once or twice in a lifetime—that
I be permitted to record the fact, to set it down in
all its ugliness, nay, even to exaggerate it a little—all
to the end that I may eventually exasperate you and
goad you into crying out, “Come, come, you are
not treating the girl with common justice!”
For, if such a thing were possible, I should desire
you to rival even me in a liking for Margaret Hugonin.
And speaking for myself, I can assure you that I have
come long ago to regard her faults with the same leniency
that I accord my own.
II
We begin on a fine May morning in Colonel Hugonin’s
rooms at Selwoode, which is, as you may or may not
know, the Hugonins’ country-place. And
there we discover the Colonel dawdling over his breakfast,
in an intermediate stage of that careful toilet which
enables him later in the day to pass casual inspection
as turning forty-nine.
Copyrights
The Eagle's Shadow from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
