And letting her work fall upon the grass, she sat smiling and thinking, her pale brown hair blown back by the wind.  In her simple gray dress, which showed the rippling beauty of every line, she was like one of these innumerable angels or virtues, by artists illustrious or forgotten, which throng the golden twilight of an Italian church; drawing back the curtains of a Doge; hovering in quiet skies; or offering the Annunciation lily, from one side of a great tomb, to the shrinking Madonna on the other.  These creations of Italy in her early prime are the most spontaneous of the children of beauty.  There are no great differences among them; the common type is lovely; they spring like flowers from one root, in which are the forces both of Greece and the Italy of Leonardo.  It was their harmony, their cheerfulness, their touch of something universal, that were somehow reproduced in this English girl, and that made the secret of her charm.

She went on thinking about Tatham.

Presently she had built a castle high in air; she had worked it out—­how she was to make Lord Tatham clearly understand, before he had any chance of proposing (if that were really in the wind, and she were not a mere lump of conceit), that marrying was not her line; but that, as a friend, he might rely upon her.  Anything—­in particular—­that she could do to help him to a wife, short of offering herself, was at his service.  She would be eyes and ears for him; she would tell him things he did not in the least suspect about the sex.

But as to marrying!  She rose from her seat, stretching her arms toward the sky and the blossoming trees, in that half-wild gesture which so truly expressed her.  Marrying Duddon! that vast house, and all those possessions; those piles of money; those county relations, and that web of inherited custom which would lay its ghostly compulsion on Tatham’s wife the very instant he had married her—­it was not to be thought of for a moment!  She, the artist with art and the world before her; she, with her soul in her own keeping, and all the beauty of sky and fell and stream to be had for the asking, to make herself the bond slave of Duddon—­of that formidably beautiful, that fond, fastidious mother!—­and of all the ceremonial and paraphernalia that must come with Duddon!  She saw herself spending weeks on the mere ordering of her clothes, calling endlessly on stupid people, opening bazaars, running hospitals, entertaining house parties, with the clef des champs gone forever—­a little drawing at odd times—­and all the meaning of life drowned in its trappings.  No—­no—­no!—­a thousand times, no!  Not though her mother implored her, and every creature in Cumbria and the universe thought her stark staring mad.  No!—­for her own sake first; but, above all, for Lord Tatham’s sake.