She was inclined
to admire a man for loving her, as a serious and solemn-thinking woman,
with bandeaux and convictions, admires a clergyman for doing his duty.
Carey had done his duty with such fiery ardour that, though she did not
prevent her husband from kicking him out of the house, she could not
refrain from thinking well of him.
Her thoughts of Robin Pierce were perhaps a little more confused.
She had not accepted him. Carey would have said that he was not "her
type." Although strong and active he was not the huge mass of bones and
muscles and thews and sinews, ignorant of beauty and devoid of the love
of art, which Carey had described as her ideal. There was melancholy and
there was subtlety in him. When Lady Holme was a girl this melancholy and
subtlety had not appealed to her sufficiently to induce her to become
Lady Viola Pierce. Nevertheless, Robin's affection for her, and the
peculiar form it took--of idealising her secret nature and wishing her
obvious beauty away--had won upon the egoism of her. Although she laughed
at his absurdity, as she called it, and honestly held to her Pagan belief
that physical beauty was all in all to the world she wished to influence,
it pleased her sometimes to fancy that perhaps he was right, that perhaps
her greatest loveliness was hidden and dwelt apart. The thought was
flattering, and though her knowledge of men rejected the idea that such a
loveliness alone could ever command an empire worth the ruling, she could
have no real objection to being credited with a double share of
charm--the charm of face and manner which everyone, including herself,
was aware that she possessed, and that other stranger, more dim and
mysterious charm at whose altar Robin burnt an agreeably perfumed
incense.
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