Altogether, a face difficult to take one’s eyes off.  But Nedda was far from vain, and her face seemed to her too short and broad, her eyes too dark and indeterminate, neither gray nor brown.  The straightness of her nose was certainly comforting, but it, too, was short.  Being creamy in the throat and browning easily, she would have liked to be marble-white, with blue dreamy eyes and fair hair, or else like a Madonna.  And was she tall enough?  Only five foot five.  And her arms were too thin.  The only things that gave her perfect satisfaction were her legs, which, of course, she could not at the moment see; they really were rather jolly!  Then, in a panic, fearing to be late, she turned and ran out, fluttering into the maze of stairs and corridors.

CHAPTER VI

Clara, Mrs. Stanley Freeland, was not a narrow woman either in mind or body; and years ago, soon indeed after she married Stanley, she had declared her intention of taking up her sister-in-law, Kirsteen, in spite of what she had heard were the woman’s extraordinary notions.  Those were the days of carriages, pairs, coachmen, grooms, and, with her usual promptitude, ordering out the lot, she had set forth.  It is safe to say she had never forgotten that experience.

Imagine an old, white, timbered cottage with a thatched roof, and no single line about it quite straight.  A cottage crazy with age, buried up to the thatch in sweetbrier, creepers, honeysuckle, and perched high above crossroads.  A cottage almost unapproachable for beehives and their bees—­an insect for which Clara had an aversion.  Imagine on the rough, pebbled approach to the door of this cottage (and Clara had on thin shoes) a peculiar cradle with a dark-eyed baby that was staring placidly at two bees sleeping on a coverlet made of a rough linen such as Clara had never before seen.  Imagine an absolutely naked little girl of three, sitting in a tub of sunlight in the very doorway.  Clara had turned swiftly and closed the wicket gate between the pebbled pathway and the mossed steps that led down to where her coachman and her footman were sitting very still, as was the habit of those people.  She had perceived at once that she was making no common call.  Then, with real courage she had advanced, and, looking down at the little girl with a fearful smile, had tickled the door with the handle of her green parasol.  A woman younger than herself, a girl, indeed, appeared in a low doorway.  She had often told Stanley since that she would never forget her first sight (she had not yet had another) of Tod’s wife.  A brown face and black hair, fiery gray eyes, eyes all light, under black lashes, and “such a strange smile”; bare, brown, shapely arms and neck in a shirt of the same rough, creamy linen, and, from under a bright blue skirt, bare, brown, shapely ankles and feet!  A voice so soft and deadly that, as Clara said:  “What with her eyes, it really