To Temple Lady St. Craye appeared the most charming woman he had ever seen. It was an effect which she had the habit of producing. He had said of her in his haste that she was all clothes and no woman, now he saw that on the contrary the clothes were quite intimately part of the woman, and took such value as they had, from her.
She carried her head with the dainty alertness of a beautiful bird. She had a gift denied to most Englishwomen--the genius for wearing clothes. No one had ever seen her dress dusty or crushed, her hat crooked. No uncomfortable accidents ever happened to her. Blacks never settled on her face, the buttons never came off her gloves, she never lost her umbrella, and in the windiest weather no loose untidy wisps escaped from her thick heavy shining hair to wander unbecomingly round the ears that were pearly and pink like the little shells of Vanessae. Some of the women who hated her used to say that she dyed her hair. It was certainly very much lighter than her brows and lashes. To-day she was wearing a corduroy dress of a gold some shades grayer than the gold of her hair. Sable trimmed it, and violet silk lined the loose sleeves and the coat, now unfastened and thrown back. There were, as Vernon had known there would be, violets under the brim of the hat that matched her hair.
The chair in which she sat wore a Chinese blue drapery. The yellow tea-cups gave the highest note in the picture.
"If I were Whistler, I should ask you to let me paint your portrait like that--yes, with my despicable yellow tea-cup in your honourable hand."
"If you were Mr. Whistler--or anything in the least like Mr. Whistler--I shouldn't be drinking tea out of your honourable tea-cup," she said. "Do you really think, Mr. Temple, that one ought not to say one doesn't like people just because they're dead?"
He had been thinking something a little like it.
"Well," he said rather awkwardly, "you see dead people can't hit back."
"No more can live ones when you don't hit them, but only stick pins in their effigies. I'd rather speak ill of the dead than the living."
"Yet it doesn't seem fair, somehow," Temple insisted.
"But why? No one can go and tell the poor things what people are saying of them. You don't go and unfold a shroud just to whisper in a corpse's ear: 'It was horrid of her to say it, but I thought you ought to know, dear.'--And if you did, they wouldn't lie awake at night worrying over it as the poor live people do.--No more tea, thank you."