Jim groaned with disgust. Kedzie giggled, accepting the groan as confession of a palpable hit. She sat musing on various costumes she might wear. She had a woman's memory for things she had caught a glimpse of in a shop-window or in a fashion magazine; she had a woman's imagination for dressing herself up mentally. As a trained mathematician can do amazing sums in his head, so Kedzie could juggle modes and combinations, colors and stuffs, and wrap hem about herself. While Kedzie composed her new gown, her husband studied her, still wondering at her and his inability to get past the barriers of her flesh to her soul. Charity's flesh seemed but the expression of herself. It was cordial and benevolent, warm and expressive in his eyes. Her hands were for handclasp, her lips for good words, her eyes for honest language. He had not embraced her except in dances years before, and in that one quickly broken embrace at Newport. He had not kissed her since they had been boy and girl lovers, but the savor of her lips was still sweet in his memory. He felt that he knew her soul utterly. He had possessed all the advantages of Kedzie without seeming to get acquainted with the ultimate interior Kedzie at all. She was to him well-known flesh inhabited by a total stranger, who fled from him mysteriously. When she embraced him she held him aloof. When she kissed him her lips pressed him back. He could not outgrow the feeling that their life together was rather a reckless flirtation than a communion of merged souls. He stared at her now and saw dark eyebrows and eyelashes etched on a white skin, starred with irises of strange hue, a nose deftly shaped, a mouth as pretty and as impersonal as a flower, a throat of some ineffably exquisite petal material. She sat with one knee lifted a little and clasped in her hands, and there was something miraculous about the felicity of the lines, the arms penciled downward from the shoulders and meeting in the delicately contoured buckle of her ten fingers, the thigh springing in a suave arc from the confluent planes of her torse, the straight shin to the curve of instep and toe and heel. Her hair was an altogether incredible extravagance of manufacture. George Meredith has described a woman's hair once for all, and if Jim had ever read anything so important as _The Egoist_ he would have said that Kedzie's poll was illustrated in that wonderfully coiffed hair-like sentence picturing Clara Middleton and “the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-colored irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps--waved or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long, round locks of gold to trick the heart.”