She was fair, tall, and boyishly slender, with pretty hair, the locks always straying over her cheeks.  Her mouth was rather large and serious, the lower lip full at the corners, her eyes large, calm and vague, with fine well-marked eyebrows.  She had a graceful chin, a pretty throat, an undeveloped figure, no hips; her hands were large and a little red, with prominent veins.  Anything would make her blush, and her girlish charm was all in the forehead and the chin.  Her eyes were always asking and dreaming, but said little.

Her father’s preference was for her, just as her mother was drawn towards the son by natural affinity.  Without thinking much about it, Clerambault had always monopolised his daughter, surrounding her from childhood with his absorbing affection.  She had been partly educated by him, and with the almost offensive simplicity of the artist mind, he had taken her for the confidante of his inner life.  This was brought about by his overflowing self-consciousness, and the little response that he found in his wife, a good creature, who, as the saying is, sat at his feet, in fact stayed there permanently, answering yes to all that he said, admiring him blindly, without understanding him, or feeling the lack; the essential to her was not her husband’s thought but himself, his welfare, his comfort, his food, his clothing, his health.  Honest Clerambault in the gratitude of his heart did not criticise his wife, any more than Rosine criticised her mother, but both of them knew how it was, instinctively, and were drawn closer by a secret tie.  Clerambault was not aware that in his daughter he had found the real wife of his heart and mind.  Nor did he begin to suspect it, till in these last days the war had seemed to break the tacit accord between them.  Rosine’s approval hitherto had bound her to him, and now all at once it failed him.  She knew many things before he did, but shrank from the depths of the mystery; the mind need not give warning to the heart, it knows.

Strange, splendid mystery of love between souls, independent of social and even of natural laws.  Few there be that know it, and fewer still that dare to reveal it; they are afraid of the coarse world and its summary judgments and can get no farther than the plain meaning of traditional language.  In this conventional tongue, which is voluntarily inexact for the sake of social simplification, words are careful not to unveil, by expressing them, the many shades of reality in its multiple forms.  They imprison it, codify it, drill it; they press it into the service of the mind already domesticated; of that reasoning power which does not spring from the depth of the spirit, but from shallow, walled-in pools—­like the basins at Versailles—­within the limits of constituted society.