Hartley's first impression of Cordelia Vaughan was a happy confusion of yellows. Her hair, luxuriant and heavily massed on the small head, was a sort of tawny gold. Her skin, which more than once had been described as like old ivory, was in truth neither ivory nor olive, but almost a pale, rose-like yellow with a transfusing warmth to its pallor, as though the lights of an open fire were playing upon it. The eyes themselves seemed, at times, a soft, jade-like yellowish green, muffled, unsatisfied, often mournful, with a latent hint of tragedy, shading off in strong lights to a sea gray; by lamplight showing a deep violet. In moments of excitement or exaltation they were slightly phosphorescent, glowing with an almost animal-like luminosity that temporarily relieved and illumined the ascetically cold chiseling of the face itself, suggesting a possible emotional power that might be stronger at times than the shell which housed it. Yet they were eyes that looked out on the world with quiet, brooding melancholy, wistful in repose, with some fugitive sadness--eyes that suggested, to the young poet at least, some wayward note of autumn, of twilight, of woodland loneliness. They seemed to betoken the dreamer in life more than the pioneer and the actor, in periods of weariness taking on a heavy, languorous, indolent look of half-careless defiance, like a tired and wilful child's. At one moment, indeed, Cordelia Vaughan reminded Hartley of an old-fashioned tea-rose, quaintly anachronistic in her modish twentieth-century gown; at another moment she brought insistently to his mind the thought of a piece of fragile chinaware with which the slag of every-day life had not yet been infused, sadly to convert it into the ironstone of ordinary mortality. "I find I am not very strong," she had confessed to him. "My work seems to take a great deal out of me." And the thought that some great internal fire was burning away both the youth and beauty of a pale priestess of Mnemosyne seemed to give to her pallor a new and redeeming touch of poignancy. For in Cordelia's days of weariness envious women, lacking her own strange resiliency of vigor, now and then maliciously declared that on such occasions she "looked her age." "I am sure I can help you a little," she was saying now, looking up at Hartley. "But first you must tell me something about yourself and your work." He was but four-and-twenty, and accustomed to the coldness and the reserve of his own older-fashioned countrywomen. So the open warmth and directness of his companion's manner at first embarrassed him a little. "That's jolly good of you; but really, you know, I haven't done anything worth talking about." "But you've got it in you; I can see you have," said the other, on her cushion of Princeton orange, looking back unhesitatingly into his searching eyes. "And then Repellier says so, too," she added encouragingly.