Grey Roses | Page 4

of
little ringlets over her forehead; the same clear, sensitive complexion;
the same rather large, full-lipped mouth, tip-tilted nose, soft chin, and
merry mischievous eyes. She moved in the same way, with the same
leisurely, almost lazy grace, that could, however, on occasions, quicken
to an alert, elastic vivacity; she had the same voice, a trifle deeper than

most women's, and of a quality never so delicately nasal, which made it
racy and characteristic; the same fresh ready laughter. There was
something arch, something a little sceptical, a little quizzical in her
expression, as if, perhaps, she were disposed to take the world, more or
less, with a grain of salt; at the same time there was something rich,
warm-blooded, luxurious, suggesting that she would know how to
savour its pleasantnesses with complete enjoyment. But if you felt that
she was by way of being the least bit satirical in her view of things, you
felt too that she was altogether good-natured, and even that, at need,
she could show herself spontaneously kind, generous, devoted. And if
you inferred that her temperament inclined rather towards the sensuous
than the ascetic, believe me, it did not lessen her attractiveness.
At the time of which I am writing now, the sentiment that reigned
between Nina and Old Childe's retinue of young men was chiefly an
esprit-de-corps. Later on we all fell in love with her; but for the present
we were simply amiably fraternal. We were united to her by a common
enthusiasm; we were fellow-celebrants at her ancestral altar--or, rather,
she was the high priestess there, we were her acolytes. For, with her,
filial piety did in very truth partake of the nature of religion; she really,
literally, idolised her father. One only needed to watch her for three
minutes, as she sat beside him, to understand the depth and ardour of
her emotion: how she adored him, how she admired him and believed
in him, how proud of him she was, how she rejoiced in him. 'Oh, you
think you know my father,' I remember her saying to us once. 'Nobody
knows him. Nobody is great enough to know him. If people knew him
they would fall down and kiss the ground he walks on.' It is certain she
deemed him the wisest, the noblest, the handsomest, the most gifted, of
human kind. That little gleam of mockery in her eye died out instantly
when she looked at him, when she spoke of him or listened to him;
instead, there came a tender light of love, and her face grew pale with
the fervour of her affection. Yet, when he jested, no one laughed more
promptly or more heartily than she. In those days I was perpetually
trying to write fiction; and Old Childe was my inveterate hero. I forget
in how many ineffectual manuscripts, under what various dread
disguises, he was afterwards reduced to ashes; I am afraid, in one case,
a scandalous distortion of him got abroad in print. Publishers are

sometimes ill-advised; and thus the indiscretions of our youth may
become the confusions of our age. The thing was in three volumes, and
called itself a novel; and of course the fatuous author had to make a bad
business worse by presenting a copy to his victim. I shall never forget
the look Nina gave me when I asked her if she had read it; I grow hot
even now as I recall it. I had waited and waited expecting her
compliments; and at last I could wait no longer, and so asked her; and
she answered me with a look! It was weeks, I am not sure it wasn't
months, before she took me back to her good graces. But Old Childe
was magnanimous; he sent me a little pencil-drawing of his head,
inscribed in the corner, 'To Frankenstein from his Monster.'
V.
It was a queer life for a girl to live, that happy-go-lucky life of the Latin
Quarter, lawless and unpremeditated, with a café for her school-room,
and none but men for comrades; but Nina liked it; and her father had a
theory in his madness. He was a Bohemian, not in practice only, but in
principle; he preached Bohemianism as the most rational manner of
existence, maintaining that it developed what was intrinsic and
authentic in one's character, saved one from the artificial, and brought
one into immediate contact with the realities of the world; and he
protested he could see no reason why a human being should be
'cloistered and contracted' because of her sex. 'What would not hurt my
son, if I had one, will not hurt my daughter. It will make a man of
her--without making her the less a woman.' So he took her with him to
the Café Bleu, and