The Woodlanders

Mrs. Charmond was at the end of a gallery opening from the hall when

Miss Melbury was announced, and saw her through the glass doors between

them. She came forward with a smile on her face, and told the young

girl it was good of her to come.

"Ah! you have noticed those," she said, seeing that Grace's eyes were

attracted by some curious objects against the walls. "They are

man-traps. My husband was a connoisseur in man-traps and spring-guns

and such articles, collecting them from all his neighbors. He knew the

histories of all these--which gin had broken a man's leg, which gun had

killed a man. That one, I remember his saying, had been set by a

game-keeper in the track of a notorious poacher; but the keeper,

forgetting what he had done, went that way himself, received the charge

in the lower part of his body, and died of the wound. I don't like

them here, but I've never yet given directions for them to be taken

away." She added, playfully, "Man-traps are of rather ominous

significance where a person of our sex lives, are they not?"

Grace was bound to smile; but that side of womanliness was one which

her inexperience had no great zest in contemplating.

"They are interesting, no doubt, as relics of a barbarous time happily

past," she said, looking thoughtfully at the varied designs of these

instruments of torture--some with semi-circular jaws, some with

rectangular; most of them with long, sharp teeth, but a few with none,

so that their jaws looked like the blank gums of old age.

"Well, we must not take them too seriously," said Mrs. Charmond, with

an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When she had

shown her visitor different articles in cabinets that she deemed likely

to interest her, some tapestries, wood-carvings, ivories, miniatures,

and so on--always with a mien of listlessness which might either have

been constitutional, or partly owing to the situation of the

place--they sat down to an early cup of tea.

"Will you pour it out, please? Do," she said, leaning back in her

chair, and placing her hand above her forehead, while her almond

eyes--those long eyes so common to the angelic legions of early Italian

art--became longer, and her voice more languishing. She showed that

oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps most frequent in women of

darker complexion and more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmond's

was; who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak

them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents

rather than steer.