She wore a long habit of silk, whose fur-trimmed edge wandered diagonally across her breast and down to the edge of her walking dress. To Colville, whom her girlish slimness in her ball costume had puzzled after his original impressions of Junonian abundance, she did not so much dwindle as seem to vanish from the proportions his visions had assigned her that first night when he saw her standing before the mirror. In this outdoor avatar, this companionship with the sun and breeze, she was new to him again, and he found himself searching his consciousness for his lost acquaintance with her, and feeling as if he knew her less and less. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very distinctive individuality; perhaps at her age no woman has, but waits for it to come to her through life, through experience. She was an expression of youth, of health, of beauty, and of the moral loveliness that comes from a fortunate combination of these; but beyond this she was elusive in a way that seemed to characterise her even materially. He could not make anything more of the mystery as he walked at her side, and he went thinking--formlessly, as people always think--that with the child or with her mother he would have had a community of interest and feeling which he lacked with this splendid girlhood! he was both too young and too old for it; and then, while he answered this or that to Imogene's talk aptly enough, his mind went back to the time when this mystery was no mystery, or when he was contemporary with it, and if he did not understand it, at least accepted it as if it wore the most natural thing in the world. It seemed a longer time now since it had been in his world than it was since he was a child. "Should you have thought," she asked, turning her face back toward him, "that it would be so hot in the sun to-day? _Oh_, that beautiful river! How it twists and writhes along! Do you remember that sonnet of Longfellow's--the one he wrote in Italian about the Ponte Vecchio, and the Arno twisting like a dragon underneath it? They say that Hawthorne used to live in a villa just behind the hill over there; we're going to look it up as soon as the weather is settled. Don't you think his books are perfectly fascinating?" "Yes," said Colville; "only I should want a good while to say it." "_I_ shouldn't!" retorted the girl. "When you've said fascinating, you've said everything. There's no other word for them. Don't you like to talk about the books you've read?" "I would if I could remember the names of the characters. But I get them mixed up." "Oh, _I_ never do! I remember the least one of them, and all they do and say." "I used to." "It seems to me you _used_ to do everything." "It seems to me as if I did." "'I remember, when I think, That my youth was half divine.'" "Oh, Tennyson--yes! _He's_ fascinating. Don't you think he's fascinating?"