Grass and garden trees seemed glittering
with something at once good and unnatural, like a fire from fairyland.
It seemed like a strange sunrise at the wrong end of the day.
The girl in white dived in quickly enough, for she wore
a white hat of the proportions of a parachute, which might
have wafted her away into the coloured clouds of evening.
She was their one splash of splendour, and irradiated wealth
in that impecunious place (staying there temporarily with a
friend), an heiress in a small way, by name Rosamund Hunt,
brown-eyed, round-faced, but resolute and rather boisterous.
On top of her wealth she was good-humoured and rather good-looking;
but she had not married, perhaps because there was always
a crowd of men around her. She was not fast (though some
might have called her vulgar), but she gave irresolute youths
an impression of being at once popular and inaccessible.
A man felt as if he had fallen in love with Cleopatra,
or as if he were asking for a great actress at the stage door.
Indeed, some theatrical spangles seemed to cling about Miss Hunt;
she played the guitar and the mandoline; she always wanted charades;
and with that great rending of the sky by sun and storm,
she felt a girlish melodrama swell again within her.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25