As her eyes roamed over the sea of splendor that stretched from their very feet, a vision of October gorgeousness against the sky, he was able to steal a glance at her.  His immediate observation was to the effect that the suggestion of wildness—­or, more correctly, of a wild origin—­was as noticeable in her now, a woman of twenty-seven, as it was when he first knew her, a girl of nineteen.  That she should have brought it with her from a childhood passed amid lakes and rivers and hills was natural enough—­just as it was natural that her voice should have that liquid cadence which belongs to people of the forest, though it is rarely caught by human speech elsewhere; but that she should have conserved these qualities through the training of a woman of the world was more remarkable.  But there it was, that something woodland-born which London and New York had neither submerged nor swept away.  It was difficult to say in what it consisted, since it eluded the effort to say, “It is this or that.”  It resisted analysis, as it defied description.  Though it might have been in the look, or in the manner, it conveyed itself to the observer’s apprehension, otherwise than by the eye or ear, as if it appealed to some extra sense.  People who had not Charles Conquest’s closeness of perception spoke of her as “odd,” while those who had heard the little there was to learn about her, said to each other, “Well, what could you expect?” Young men, as a rule, fought shy of her, not so much from indifference as from a sense of an indefinable barrier between her and themselves so that it was the older men who sought her out.  There was always some fear on Conquest’s part lest the world should so assimilate her that her distinctiveness—­which was more like an influence that radiated than a characteristic that could be seen—­would desert her; and it was with conscious satisfaction that he noted now, after an absence of some months, that it was still there.

He noted, too, the sure lines of her profile—­a profile becoming clearer cut as she grew older—­features wrought with delicacy and yet imbued with strength, suggestive of carved ivory.  Delicacy imbued with strength was betokened, too, by the tall slenderness of her figure, whose silence and suppleness of movement came—­in Conquest’s imagination at least—­from her far-off forest ancestry.

“I couldn’t live anywhere else but here—­if it must be in New York,” she said, turning from the window.  “I couldn’t do without the sense of woods, and space, and sky.  I can stand at this window and imagine all sorts of things—­that the park really does run into the Catskills, as it seems to do—­that the Catskills run into the Adirondacks—­and that the Adirondacks take me up to the Laurentides with which my earliest recollections begin.”

“I think you’re something like Shelley’s Venice,” he smiled, “a sort of ‘daughter of the earth and ocean.’  You never seem to me to belong in just the ordinary category—­”