She heard the door shut. She could look in the glass now and amuse herself by the sight they had stared at. The white face raised on the strong neck and shoulders. Soft white nose, too thick at the nuzzling tip. Brown eyes straight and wide open. Deep-grooved, clear-cut eyelids, heavy lashes. Mouth--clear-cut arches, moulded corners, brooding. Her eyes and her mouth. She could see they were strange. She could see they were beautiful.
And herself, her mysterious, her secret self, Charlotte Redhead. It had been secret and mysterious to itself once, before she knew.
She didn't want to be secret and mysterious. Of all things she hated secrecy and mystery. She would tell Gwinnie about Gibson Herbert when she came. She would have to tell her.
Down at the end of the looking-glass picture, behind her, the bow window and the slender back of a man standing there.
* * * * *
She had got him clear by this time. If he went to-morrow he would stay, moving about forever in your mind. The young body, alert and energetic; slender gestures of hands. The small imperious head carried high. The spare, oval face with the straight-jutting, pointed chin. Honey-white face, thin dusk and bistre of eyelids and hollow temples and the roots of the hair. Its look of being winged, lifted up, ready to start off on an adventure. Hair brushed back in two sleek, dark wings. The straight slender nose, with the close upward wings of its nostrils (it wasn't Roman after all). Under it the winged flutter of his mouth when he smiled.
Black eyebrows almost meeting, the outer ends curling up queerly, like little moustaches. And always the hard, blue knife-blade eyes.
She knew his name the first day. He had told her. Conway. John Roden Conway.
The family from Birmingham had frightened him. So he sat at her table in the bow. They talked. About places--places. Places they had seen and hadn't seen; places they wanted to see, and the ways you could get to places. He trusted to luck; he risked things; he was out, he said, for risk. She steered by the sun, by instinct, by the map in her head. She remembered. But you could buy maps. He bought one the next day.
They went for long walks together. She found out the field paths. And they talked. Long, innocent conversations. He told her about himself. He came from Coventry. His father was a motor car manufacturer; that was why he liked tramping.
She told him she was going to learn farming. You could be happy all day long looking after animals. Swinging up on the big bare backs of cart horses and riding them to water; milking cows and feeding calves. And lambs. When their mothers were dead. They would run to you then, and climb into your lap and sit there--sucking your fingers.