A catastrophe had thrown Jean Jacques into her arms; it would not
be a catastrophe which would throw the master-carpenter into her arms. It
would be that they wanted each other.
The mirror gave her a look of dominance--was it her regular features and
her classic head? Does beauty in itself express authority, just because
it has the transcendent thing in it? Does the perfect form convey
something of the same thing that physical force--an army in arms, a
battleship--conveys? In any case it was there, that inherent
masterfulness, though not in its highest form. She was not an aristocrat,
she was no daughter of kings, no duchess of Castile, no dona of Segovia;
and her beauty belonged to more primary manifestations; but it was above
the lower forms, even if it did not reach to the highest. "A handsome
even splendid woman of her class" would have been the judgment of the
connoisseur.
As she looked in the glass at her clear skin, at the wonderful throat
showing so soft and palpable and tower-like under the black velvet ribbon
brightened by a paste ornament; as she saw the smooth breadth of brow,
the fulness of the lips, the limpid lustre of the large eyes, the
well-curved ear, so small and so like ivory, it came home to her, as it
had never done before, that she was wasted in this obscure parish of St.
Saviour's.
There was not a more restless soul or body in all the hemisphere than the
soul and body of Carmen Barbille, as she went from this to that on the
morning when Jean Jacques had refrained from killing the soul-disturber,
the master-carpenter, who had with such skill destroyed the walls and
foundations of his home.
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