So it was arranged.  Papa went out.  I curled up on a lounge,—­for Lu wouldn’t have liked to be left, if I had liked to leave her,—­and soon, when he sat down by her quite across the room, I half shut my eyes and pretended to sleep.  He began to turn over her work-basket, taking up her thimble, snipping at the thread with her scissors:  I see now he wasn’t thinking about it, and was trying to recover what he considered a proper state of feeling, but I fancied he was very gentle and tender, though I couldn’t hear what they said, and I never took the trouble to listen in my life.  In about five minutes I was tired of this playing ’possum, and took my observations.

What is your idea of a Louise?  Mine is dark eyes, dark hair, decided features, pale, brown pale, with a mole on the left cheek,—­and that’s Louise.  Nothing striking, but pure and clear, and growing always better.

For him,—­he’s not one of those cliff-like men against whom you are blown as a feather, I don’t fancy that kind; I can stand of myself, rule myself.  He isn’t small, though; no, he’s tall enough, but all his frame is delicate, held to earth by nothing but the cords of a strong will, —­very little body, very much soul.  He, too, is pale, and has dark eyes with violet darks in them.  You don’t call him beautiful in the least, but you don’t know him.  I call him beauty itself, and I know him thoroughly.  A stranger might have thought, when I spoke of those copals Rose carved, that Rose was some girl.  But though he has a feminine sensibility, like Correggio or Schubert, nobody could call him womanish. “Les races se feminisent.”  Don’t you remember Matthew Roydon’s Astrophill?

  “A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
  A full assurance given by looks,
  Continual comfort in a face.”

I always think of that flame in an alabaster vase, when I see him; “one sweet grace fed still with one sweet mind”; a countenance of another sphere:  that’s Vaughan Rose.  It provokes me that I can’t paint him myself, without other folk’s words; but you see there’s no natural image of him in me, and so I can’t throw it strongly on any canvas.  As for his manners, you’ve seen them;—­now tell me, was there ever anything so winning when he pleases, and always a most gracious courtesy in his air, even when saying an insufferably uncivil thing?  He has an art, a science, of putting the unpleasant out of his sight, ignoring or looking over it, which sometimes gives him an absent way; and that is because he so delights in beauty; he seems to have woven a mist over his face then, and to be shut in on his own inner loveliness; and many a woman thinks he is perfectly devoted, when, very like, he is swinging over some lonely Spanish sierra beneath the stars, or buried in noonday Brazilian forests, half stifled with the fancied breath of every gorgeous blossom of the zone.  Till this time, it had been the perfection of form rather than tint that had enthralled him; he had come home with severe ideas, too severe; he needed me, you see.