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It came in the evening's mail and was extended to me by Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all snapshots a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk through his carefully pointed beard.
Women's gowns on the flowing and Grecian order were not uncommon. These were usually coupled with the incongruity of parted hair brought low and madonna-wise over the ears. As the two entered, a very powerful blond man was just finishing the declamation of a French poem. He was addressing it directly at two women seated on a sofa. "Un r-r-reve d'amour!"
A Spanish student, in a velvet coat and with long black hair, insisted upon charcoaling mustachios and imperial upon his host's countenance, in honor of his countryman who had distinguished himself as a patron of art. Later, a laughing girl whose blue-black hair was banded Madonna-wise around a head considerably otherwise, washed it off with a table napkin dipped in wine.
Among the crowded goods the women sat Madonna-wise and nursed their bambini, or cherishing the recurrent hope, knitted interminably. If he wanted any evidence of what he admitted between the girl and himself it flashed out for him in the faces of the market wives, on whom labour and maternity sat not too heavily to cloud the primal radiance.
Whatever secret of the past may have hovered over the Fouchet household, the evil bird had not made its nest in madame's breast, that was clear; her smooth, white brow was the sign of a rose-leaf conscience; that dark curtain of hair, looped madonna-wise over each ear, framed a face as unruffled as her conscience.
For to-day a festa had been granted in Murano. Then, wrapping herself closely in the soft folds of her gray mantle, falling Madonna-wise from her head and shrouding her figure, she glided for the last time over the ponte and down past the sleeping homes of Murano; for it was yet early for matins, and she would have the Madonna all to herself as she knelt with her heart full of tenderness for the dear life this day should merge in that other which beckoned her with joyous anticipation yet stilled to serenity by the golden glory and promise of the dawn, and the beautiful, self-sacrificing, upholding faith of the great-hearted Girolamo.
We were all in a whirl of unfinished sentences when Miss Dulany entered. I wish you might have seen her, as she came toward us! Of course she was a very pretty child in North Carolina, but she has developed into something really remarkable. She wore white, décolleté, with her hair Madonna-wise. And she has such distinction! Such repose!
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