It was as if, in calling, he had done even better than he intended. For it was somehow IMPORTANT--that was what it was--that there should be at this hour something the matter with Mrs. Assingham, with whom, in all their acquaintance, so considerable now, there had never been the least little thing the matter. To wait thus and watch for it was to know of a truth that there was something the matter with HIM; since--strangely, with so little to go upon--his heart had positively begun to beat to the time of suspense. It fairly befell at last for a climax that they almost ceased to pretend--to pretend, that is, to cheat each other with forms. The unspoken had come up, and there was a crisis--neither could have said how long it lasted--during which they were reduced, for all interchange, to looking at each other on quite an inordinate scale. They might at this moment, in their positively portentous stillness, have been keeping it up for a wager, sitting for their photograph or even enacting a tableau-vivant.
The spectator of whom they would thus well have been worthy might have read meanings of his own into the intensity of their communion--or indeed, even without meanings, have found his account, aesthetically, in some gratified play of our modern sense of type, so scantly to be distinguished from our modern sense of beauty. Type was there, at the worst, in Mrs. Assingham's dark neat head, on which the crisp black hair made waves so fine and so numerous that she looked even more in the fashion of the hour than she (34) desired. Full of discriminations against the obvious, she had yet to accept a flagrant appearance and to make the best of misleading signs.
Her richness of hue, her generous nose, her eyebrows marked like those of an actress--these things, with an added amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the South, or still more of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit with a pet gazelle. She was in fact however neither a pampered Jewess nor a lazy Creole; New York had been recordedly her birth place and "Europe" punctually her discipline. She wore yellow and purple because she thought it better, as she said, while one was about it, to look like the Queen of Sheba than like a revendeuse; she put pearls in her hair and crimson and gold in her tea-gown for the same reason: it was her theory that nature itself had overdressed her and that her only course was to drown, as it was hopeless to try to chasten, the over dressing.
So she was covered and surrounded with "things," which were frankly toys and shams, a part of the amusement with which she rejoiced to supply her friends. These friends were in the game--that of playing with the disparity between her aspect and her character. Her character was attested by the second movement of her face, which convinced the be holder that her vision of the humours of the world was not supine, not passive. She enjoyed, she needed the warm air of friendship, but the eyes of the American (35) city looked out, somehow, for the opportunity of it, from under the lids of Jerusalem. With her false indolence, in short, her false leisure, her false pearls and palms and courts and fountains, she was a person for whom life was multitudinous detail, detail that left her, as it at any moment found her, unappalled and unwearied.