"Well, sir, I took it the best way I could. I knew that sophisticated Continentals have different standards from our old American ones, and anyway, I really knew nothing against the woman. A charlatan, perhaps, but why necessarily any worse? I suppose I tried to keep as naïve as possible about such things in those days, for the boy's sake. Clearly, there was nothing for a man of sense to do but to let Denis alone so long as his new wife conformed to de Russy ways. Let her have a chance to prove herself--perhaps she wouldn't hurt the family as much as some might fear. So I didn't raise any objections or ask any penitence. The thing was done, and I stood ready to welcome the boy back, whatever he brought with him. * * * * * "They got here three weeks after the telegram telling of the marriage. Marceline was beautiful, and I could see how the boy might very well get foolish about her. She did have an air of breeding, and I think to this day she must have had some strain of good blood in her. She was apparently not much over twenty; of medium size, fairly slim, and as graceful as a tigress in posture and motions. Her complexion was a deep olive, and her eyes were large and very dark. She had small, classically regular features, though not quite clean-cut enough to suit my taste, and the most singular head of jet-black hair that I ever saw. "I didn't wonder that she had dragged the subject of hair into her magical cult, for with that heavy profusion of it the idea must have occurred to her naturally. Coiled up, it made her look like some Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey Beardsley's. Hanging down her back, it came well below her knees and shone in the light as if it possessed some separate, unholy vitality of its own. I would almost have thought of Medusa or Berenice myself without having such things suggested to me, upon seeing and studying that hair. "Sometimes I thought it moved slightly of itself, and tended to arrange itself in distinct ropes or strands, but this may have been sheer illusion. She brushed it incessantly, and seemed to use some sort of preparation on it. I got the notion once, a curious, whimsical notion, that it was a living thing which she had to feed in some strange way. All nonsense--but it added to my feeling of constraint about her and her hair.