or nature.
    Cecilia's avidity to see and study the face preserved her at a higher mark.
    She knew the person instantly; had no occasion to ask who this was. She sat
over the portrait blushing burningly: »And that is a brother?« she said.
    »That is her brother Roland, and very like her, except in complexion,« said
Rosamund.
    Cecilia murmured of a general resemblance in the features. Renée enchained
her. Though but a sun-shadow, the vividness of this French face came out
surprisingly; air was in the nostrils and speech flew from the tremulous mouth.
The eyes? were they quivering with internal light, or were they set to seem so
in the sensitive strange curves of the eyelids whose awakened lashes appeared to
tremble on some borderland between lustreful significance and the mists? She
caught at the nerves like certain aoristic combinations in music, like tones of
a stringed instrument swept by the wind, enticing, unseizable. Yet she sat there
at her father's feet gazing out into the world indifferent to spectators,
indifferent even to the common sentiment of gracefulness. Her left hand clasped
his right, and she supported herself on the floor with the other hand leaning
away from him, to the destruction of conventional symmetry in the picture. None
but a woman of consummate breeding dared have done as she did. It was not
Southern suppleness that saved her from the charge of harsh audacity, but
something of the kind of genius in her mood which has hurried the greater poets
of sound and speech to impose their naturalness upon accepted laws, or show the
laws to have been our meagre limitations.
    The writer in this country will, however, be made safest, and the excellent
body of self-appointed thongmen, who walk up and down our ranks flapping their
leathern straps to terrorize us from experiments in imagery, will best be
satisfied, by the statement that she was indescribable: a term that exacts no
labour of mind from him or from them, for it flows off the pen as readily as it
fills a vacuum.
    That posture of Renée displeased Cecilia and fascinated her. In an
exhibition of paintings she would have passed by it in pure displeasure: but
here was Nevil's first love, the woman who loved him; and she was French. After
a continued study of her Cecilia's growing jealousy betrayed itself in a
conscious rivalry of race, coming to the admission that Englishwomen cannot
fling themselves about on the floor without agonizing the graces: possibly, too,
they cannot look singularly without risks in the direction of slyness and brazen
archness;