Dunstone's Dear Lady - Page 2

"Sweet Lady," things
that I find eloquent of what he found in her. What that was I fancy I
understand, and yet I cannot say it quite. One has to resort to the
extended arm and fingers vibratile.

Before he married her--which he did while she was still in
half-mourning--there was anxiety about her health, and I understood she
needed air and exercise and strengthening food. But she recovered
rapidly after her marriage, her eyes grew brighter, we saw less of
Sackbut's "delicious skeleton." And then, in the strangest way, she
began to change. It is none of my imagining; I have heard the change
remarked upon by half a dozen independent observers. Yet you would think
a girl of three-and-twenty (as she certainly was) had attained her
development as a woman. I have heard her compared to a winter bud, cased
in its sombre scales, until the sun shone, and the warm, moist winds
began to blow. I noticed first that the delicate outline of her cheek
was filling, and then came the time when she reverted to colour in her
dress.

Her first essays were charitably received. Her years of struggle, her
year of mourning, had no doubt dwarfed her powers in this direction;
presently her natural good taste would reassert itself. But the next
effort and the next were harder to explain. It was not the note of
nervousness or inexperience we saw; there was an undeniable decision,
and not a token of shame. The little black winter bud grew warm-coloured
above, and burst suddenly into extravagant outlines and chromatic
confusion. Harringay, who is a cad, first put what we were all feeling
into words. "I've just seen Dunstone and his donah," he said. Clearly
she was one of those rare women who cannot dress. And that was not all.
A certain buoyancy, hitherto unsuspected, crept into her manner, as the
corpuscles multiplied in her veins--an archness. She talked more, and
threw up a spray of playfulness. And, with a growing energy, she began
to revise the exquisite æsthetic balance of Dunstone's house. She even
enamelled a chair.

For a year or so I was in the East. When I returned Mrs. Dunstone amazed
me. In some odd way she had grown, she had positively grown. She was
taller, broader, brighter--infinitely brighter. She wore a diamond
brooch in the afternoon. The "delicious skeleton" had vanished in
plumpness. She moved with emphasis. Her eye--which glittered--met mine
bravely, and she talked as one who would be heard. In the old days you
saw nothing but a rare timid glance from under the pretty lids. She
talked now of this and that, of people of "good family," and the
difficulty of getting a suitable governess for her little boy. She said
she objected to meeting people