...That is the effect
in that dark face. She has a curious character, I should think. Not very
frank. She--well, she rather struck me as having been born for drama;
tragic drama, I am afraid."
"Not a bit like her brother. How old is she?"
"Twenty-two, she told me."
"What--what does she do? They are not a bit well off."
He hesitated a moment. "Well--as I recall it, she is studying something or
other at the University of California."
"And of course she boards down there with her brother, who takes care of
her while she is studying to be a teacher or something." Alexina having
arranged it to her satisfaction dismissed the subject. She had no mind to
betray herself to this good-looking young Englishman who had been sent
to her providentially on a very dull day. He would, no doubt, have been
frantically interesting if he had not been so idiotic as to fall head over
ears the first shot.
Still...Alexina examined him covertly as he transferred his gaze for a
moment to the mountains across the distant bay, swimming now in a pale
blue mist with a wide banner of pale pink above them....If she had met him
first, or had never met the other at all...who knew?
III
Alexina, for all her passion for romance, had a remarkably level head. She
was quite aware that there had been a certain amount of deliberation in her
own headlong plunge, convinced as she was that high romance belonged to
youth alone, and fearful lest it pass her by; aware also that a part of
Dwight's halo, aside from his looks and manners and chivalrous charm,
consisted in his being a martyr to an unjust fate, and, as such, under the
ban of her august family.
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