But when there is a soul behind the matchless eyes, and a keen wit
animates the lovely mouth, and when the indication of the white
forehead is not belied, it is a nice question whether great beauty
be a gift of benign or malicious fairies. Not a woman in this room
or in any room she entered could look at Rachael Breckenridge
without a pang; her supremacy was beyond all argument or dispute.
And yet there was neither complacency nor content in the lovely
face; it wore its usual expression of arrogant amusement at a
somewhat tiresome world.
Both in the instant impression it made, and under closest
analysis, Rachael Breckenridge's beauty stood all tests. Her
colorless skin was as pure as ivory, her dark-blue eyes,
surrounded by that faint sooty color that only Irish eyes know,
were set far apart and evenly arched by perfect brows. Her white
forehead was low and broad, the lustreless black hair was swept
back from it with almost startling simplicity, the line of her
mouth was long, her lips a living red. Her figure, as she sat
balancing carelessly on a chair-arm, showed the exquisite curves
of a woman slow to develop, who is approaching the height of her
beauty, and from the tip of her white shoe to the poppies on her
soft straw hat there was that distinction in her clothing that
betrayed her to be one of the few who may be always individual yet
always in the fashion. She was a woman, quick, dynamic, impatient,
who vitalized the very atmosphere in which she moved, challenging
life by endless tests and measures, scornful of admiration, and
ambitious, even in this recognized ambition of finding herself
beautiful, prominent, and a rich man's wife, for something further
and greater, she knew not what. She was an important figure in
this world of hers; her word was authority, her decree law. Never
was censure so quick as hers, never criticism so biting, or satire
so witty. No human emotion was too sacred to form a target for her
glancing arrows, nor was any affection deep enough to arouse in
her anything but doubt and scorn.
"I don't want any tea, thank you, Peter," she said now, in the
astonishingly rich voice that seemed to fill the words with new
meaning. "And I won't allow the Infant to have any--no, Billy, you
shall not. You've got a complexion, child; respect it. Besides,
you've just had some. Besides, we're here for only two seconds--
it's six o'clock. We're looking for Clarence--we seek a husband
fond, a parent dear--"
"Clarence hasn't showed up here at all to-day," said Peter
Pomeroy, stretching back comfortably in his chair, appreciative
eyes upon Clarence's wife. "Shame, too, for we had some good golf.
Course is in splendid condition. George beat me three up and two
to play, but I don't bear any malice. Here I am signing for his
highball."