The impression remained that she was unsafe; that she was a complex,
willful, passionate creature, who might easily engulf a too confiding
spirit in the eddies of her capricious temper. And yet he strongly felt
her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination! Roderick, in the glow
of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal,
was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her
beauty.
"I had no idea of it," he said, "till I began to look at her with an eye
to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most
exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not
a line without meaning, not a hair's breadth that is not admirably
finished. And then her mouth! It 's as if a pair of lips had been shaped
to utter pure truth without doing it dishonor!" Later, after he had been
working for a week, he declared if Miss Light were inordinately plain,
she would still be the most fascinating of women. "I 've quite forgotten
her beauty," he said, "or rather I have ceased to perceive it as
something distinct and defined, something independent of the rest of
her.
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