Elizabeth was nondescript. Her hair was golden-red and as soft as woven
wind. Her skin had the fairness of peach bloom when bees are coming and
going in the sunlit air and there is such sweetness. Under her eyes lay
a deeper flush like that sometimes seen on a child's face after a first
day's sunburn by the waterside in springtime. Her own face might have
been called the face of four crescents. Two of the crescents you always
saw--her eyebrows, twin down-curved bands of palest gold. In order to
see the other crescents, you had only to tell Elizabeth some story. As
you finished, she who had been leaning over toward you slowly closed her
eyes and drew in a breath as though to drink the last delight of it; her
thin lips parted tightly across her pointed little teeth in a smile of
thanks; and then in each cheek a curved dimple came out, shaped like
what the farmers in Elizabeth's country call "a dry moon" when it
appears thus set up on end in the evening sky--the water for the month
having all run out.
Elizabeth's nose did not appear to have originated in the New World, but
to be one of those steep Lombard noses, which on the faces of northern
Italians seem to have started down the Alps in a landslide, to have gone
a certain distance toward the Mediterranean, and then suddenly to have
disappeared over the precipice of the chin. Across the Alpine nose was
stretched a tiny spiderweb golden bridge: Elizabeth wore spectacles. The
frames were of the palest gold--she insisted they must be the exact
color of her eyebrows.
It was the glasses perhaps that gave to her face its look of dreaminess.
But there were times when her eyes pained. (All the doctors had never
been able to keep them from paining.) And this often compelled her to
sit with them closed and do nothing; then her face became dreamier. But
always the look bespoke an introspection of happiness. It drew your mind
back to the work of those unknown artisans of Tanagra, who centuries
before our era expressed in little terra-cotta figures the freedom and
joy of Greek children in the old Greek life. Whatever the children are
doing, they are happy about it; if they are doing nothing, they are
happy about doing nothing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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