Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/149

 weather-beaten, and placidly but incommunicably wise.

She had been trying to write for him, and she was worried by a sense of her shortcomings. She appealed to me for advice with that respect which you feel for a writer whose works you have never read. He listened to us as indulgently as Emerson contemplating a dancing-lesson, and I was relieved when he rose quietly and stole out.

It appeared that she was a college graduate, educated in modern languages, a studious reader, fond of serious fiction and able to pass judgment on it with cheerful common sense. She seemed to have an idea that there must be in writing, as there is in golf, a proper stance, a correct stroke, a championship method. She had evidently been an athletic young girl. She was now perhaps thirty, neither handsome nor graceful, but interesting and individual. I had seen her walking with a long-armed stride, in low heels, with the powerful shoulder slouch of a tennis-player; now she sat listening intently, leaning forward, with her arms folded on her knees, smiling apologetically at the eagerness and the ignorance of her own questions. Her eyes were spirited. Her face was not. It did not express her. She looked out from behind its too large and immobile features as if knowing that they came between her and your sympathy, and as if straining to hold you to her eyes, which I found frankly magnetic.