line.  She was magnificently neat; everything she showed had a way of looking both old and fresh; and there was on every occasion the same picture in her draped head—­draped in low-falling black—­and the fine white plaits (of a painter’s white, somehow) disposed on her chest.  What had happened was that these arrangements, determined by certain considerations, lent themselves in effect much better to certain others.  Adopted in mere shy silence they had really only deepened her accent.  It was singular, moreover, that, so constituted, there was nothing in her aspect of the ascetic or the nun.  She was a good hard sixteenth-century figure, not withered with innocence, bleached rather by life in the open.  She was in short just what we had made of her, a Holbein for a great Museum; and our position, Mrs. Munden’s and mine, rapidly became that of persons having such a treasure to dispose of.  The world—­I speak of course mainly of the art-world—­flocked to see it.

CHAPTER IV

“But has she any idea herself, poor thing?” was the way I had put it to Mrs. Munden on our next meeting after the incident at my studio; with the effect, however, only of leaving my friend at first to take me as alluding to Mrs. Brash’s possible prevision of the chatter she might create.  I had my own sense of that—­this provision had been nil; the question was of her consciousness of the office for which Lady Beldonald had counted on her and for which we were so promptly proceeding to spoil her altogether.

“Oh I think she arrived with a goodish notion,” Mrs. Munden had replied when I had explained; “for she’s clever too, you know, as well as good-looking, and I don’t see how, if she ever really knew Nina, she could have supposed for a moment that she wasn’t wanted for whatever she might have left to give up.  Hasn’t she moreover always been made to feel that she’s ugly enough for anything?” It was even at this point already wonderful how my friend had mastered the case and what lights, alike for its past and its future, she was prepared to throw on it.  “If she has seen herself as ugly enough for anything she has seen herself—­and that was the only way—­as ugly enough for Nina; and she has had her own manner of showing that she understands without making Nina commit herself to anything vulgar.  Women are never without ways for doing such things—­both for communicating and receiving knowledge—­that I can’t explain to you, and that you wouldn’t understand if I could, since you must be a woman even to do that.  I daresay they’ve expressed it all to each other simply in the language of kisses.  But doesn’t it at any rate make something rather beautiful of the relation between them as affected by our discovery—?”

I had a laugh for her plural possessive.  “The point is of course that if there was a conscious bargain, and our action on Mrs. Brash is to deprive her of the sense of keeping her side of it, various things may happen that won’t be good either for her or for ourselves.  She may conscientiously throw up the position.”