There was a composure about the mother, but he did not know if it were stolidity or poise. Certainly she had known poverty, but health was in her skin, and there was something in that white profile, that the sun had touched with olive rather than tan, that stopped his look. The perfection of it dismayed Bellair. He loved beauty, but did not trust it, did not trust himself with it. The presence of a beautiful face stimulated him as no wine could do, but it also started him to idealising that which belonged to it, and this process had heretofore brought disappointment. Bellair did not want this touch of magnetism now. Beauty was plentiful. He had seen the profiles of Italian girls in New York, that the Greeks would have worshipped, and which the early worship of the Greeks was doubtless responsible for--beauty with little beside but giggle and sham. He disliked the thing in a man’s breast that answers so instantly to the line and colour of a woman’s face; objected to it primarily, because it was one of the first and most obvious tricks of nature for the replenishment of species in man and below. Bellair fancied to answer the captivation, if any at all, of a deeper wonder in woman than the contour of her countenance. He was aware that many a woman has a beautiful profile, whose direct look is a disturbing reconsideration. This kept his eyes down, when she was opposite in the dining cabin. We are strangely trained at table; at no time so merciful. The human dining countenance must be lovely, indeed, not to break the laws of beauty. Only outright lovers dare, and they are bewildered by each other, and see not. So he did not know the colour of her eyes. She nursed her baby often on deck, sitting bare-headed in the wind and sun, sometimes singing to it. The singing was all her own; Bellair wished she wouldn’t. Her melodies were foreign, and sometimes it seemed to him as if they were just a touch off the key. Her low dissonances, he described vaguely as Russian, but retained the suspicion that she was tonally imperfect of hearing. The singing and the picture of her was just as far as possible from Bessie Brealt, but she made Bellair think. In all likelihood this was the general objection. His eyes smarted in the dusks, as he thought of the other singer (as solitary in New York as this woman here), who was determined not to be afraid of the cars or the bears or the wolves. Every day Bessie’s first words returned to him: “A little Rhine wine--it’s very good here.”