Page:The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/172

164 like that of a woman conceiving, perhaps excusably, of her head as "noble," and irregularly streaked to-day with white. If, however, she represented for Spencer Coyle the genius of a military race, it was not that she had the step of a grenadier or the vocabulary of a camp-follower; it was only that such sympathies were vividly implied in the general fact to which her very presence and each of her actions and glances and tones were a constant and direct allusion—the paramount valor of her family. If she was military, it was because she sprang from a military house and because she wouldn't for the world have been anything but what the Wingraves had been. She was almost vulgar about her ancestors; and if one had been tempted to quarrel with her, one would have found a fair pretext in her defective sense of proportion. This temptation, however, said nothing to Spencer Coyle, for whom, as a strong character revealing itself in color and sound, she was as a spectacle, and who was glad to regard her as a force exerted on his own side. He wished her nephew had more of her