"Isn't she beautiful?"
"Well!" cried the girl defiantly--withal unmoved.
She was dazzling--alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a
glance. Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter
color of the room.
Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an
orange glory. The stirred fire burnished the copper andirons on
the hearth--
"I'm a solid block of ice," murmured Gloria casually, glancing around
with eyes whose irises were of the most delicate and transparent bluish
white. "What a slick fire! We found a place where you could stand on an
iron-bar grating, sort of, and it blew warm air up at you--but Dick
wouldn't wait there with me. I told him to go on alone and let me
be happy."
Conventional enough this. She seemed talking for her own pleasure,
without effort. Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her
profile against the foreground of the lamp: the exquisite regularity of
nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a
rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely
classical, almost cold--but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once
flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.
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