I speak of him as old, and indeed we always called him Old Childe
among ourselves; yet he was barely fifty. Nina, when I first made her
acquaintance, must have been a girl of sixteen or seventeen;
though--tall, with an amply-rounded, mature-seeming figure--if one
had judged from her appearance, one would have fancied her three or
four years older. For that matter, she looked then very much as she
looks now; I can perceive scarcely any alteration. She had the same
dark hair, gathered up in a big smooth knot behind, and breaking into
a tumult 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.'