Florence Quincy was a tall woman so blonde as to be almost albino. She
had a large mouth which she made up to suggest danger; it became, under
her lavish use of vermilion lip-stick, a fixed and sullen sneer. She
wound her flaxen hair closely, and even in the house she usually wore
a turban, also closely wound. These turbans ranged from the richest
materials to her beige stockings, which one day we caught her twining
and pinning into shape. “Nothing else in the place that exactly matched
the shade of my frock,” she explained. Her eyes were greenish and grey
and almost blue. The amusing negroid suggestion of her features lay
in a certain drooping heaviness, and was contradicted by a positive
hint of the equine. She had--in short--a face that could not be easily
forgotten.
She sat looking into the fire. Spencer Mapes hung over her although
he was seated beside her on the club fender; he always seemed to be
a cloud descending on the earth and undecided when to smite with his
thunderbolt. As I came in he was saying, with his nice mingling of
wistful regret and detached cruelty: “Her spirit is too rare, isn’t
it, for the things that help you and me to do her the least good? Life
hurts her. And, if we grant this, can we censure her for what she may
do--for what, I might say, I’m confident she’s planning to do?”