Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 1 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/87

 girlish bride. She had had beauty at that hour, though she probably had looked terribly frightened at the altar. Her marked refinement of line and surface seemed to tell how her son had come by his elegance, his physical finish. She wore no cap, and her auburn hair, which was of extraordinary fineness, was smoothed and confined with Puritanic precision. She was excessively shy and altogether most humble-minded; it was singular to see a woman to whom the experience of the elm-shaded life had conveyed such scanty reassurance. Rowland began immediately to like her and to feel impatient to persuade her that, as Cecilia had originally said of him, he meant well. He foresaw that she would be easy to persuade and that the right shade of encouragement—it would have to be only the right one—would probably make her pass fluttering from distrust into an oppressive extreme of confidence. But he had an indefinable sense that the person who was testing a strong young eyesight in the dim candle-light was less readily beguiled from her mysterious feminine preconceptions. Miss Garland, according to Cecilia's judgement, as Rowland remembered, had not a countenance to inspire a sculptor; but it seemed to Rowland that she might with some success hold in contemplation a man whose relation to the beautiful was amateurish. She was not pretty as the eye of habit judges prettiness, but he noted that when he had made the observation he had somehow failed to set it down against her, for he had already passed from measuring contours to tracing meanings. In Mary Garland's face there were many possible ones, and they might give him the more to 53