Sublime

it so happened that ‘a gentleman of honourable parentage’ had a daughter with just the right qualifications, she being ‘of excellent parts for musicke, her needle, and good discourse, also very beautiful and personable’.

Avdotya Romanovna was remarkably good looking; she was tall, strikingly well-proportioned, strong and self-reliant — the latter quality was apparent in every gesture, though it did not in the least detract from the grace and softness of her movements.

Stitched among the whorls were so many seed pearls, in such a massed weight, the dress could only have been worn by a strong woman whose love for extravagance and style exceeded the desire for comfort.

And if it was for any sort of a fine handsome woman, but for a little fistful of a woman like Kitty Keary, that’s not four feet high hardly, and not three teeth in her head unless she got new ones!

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

And now the handsome woman in evening dress (Edwardian evening dress, Pendlebury thought, décolleté but polypetalous) was singing, and the rest were hushed to listen.