The Eagles Shadow | Page 2

I have never found a woman under forty-five who shared my
opinion. If you clap a Testament into my hand, I cannot affirm that
women are eager to recognise beauty in one another; at the utmost they
concede that this or that particular feature is well enough. But when a
woman is clean-eyed and straight-limbed, and has a cheery heart, she
really cannot help being beautiful; and when Nature accords her a

sufficiency of dimples and an infectious laugh, I protest she is
well-nigh irresistible. And all these Margaret Hugonin had.
And surely that is enough.
I shall not endeavour, then, to picture her features to you in any nicely
picked words. Her chief charm was that she was Margaret.
And besides that, mere carnal vanities are trivial things; a gray eye or
so is not in the least to the purpose. Yet since it is the immemorial
custom of writer-folk to inventory such possessions of their heroines,
here you have a catalogue of her personal attractions. Launce's method
will serve our turn.
Imprimis, there was not very much of her--five feet three, at the most;
and hers was the well-groomed modern type that implies a grandfather
or two and is in every respect the antithesis of that hulking Venus of the
Louvre whom people pretend to admire. Item, she had blue eyes; and
when she talked with you, her head drooped forward a little. The frank,
intent gaze of these eyes was very flattering and, in its ultimate effect,
perilous, since it led you fatuously to believe that she had forgotten
there were any other trousered beings extant. Later on you found this a
decided error. Item, she had a quite incredible amount of yellow hair,
that was not in the least like gold or copper or bronze--I scorn the
hackneyed similes of metallurgical poets--but a straightforward yellow,
darkening at the roots; and she wore it low down on her neck in great
coils that were held in place by a multitude of little golden hair-pins
and divers corpulent tortoise-shell ones. Item, her nose was a tiny
miracle of perfection; and this was noteworthy, for you will observe
that Nature, who is an adept at eyes and hair and mouths, very rarely
achieves a creditable nose. Item, she had a mouth; and if you are a
Gradgrindian with a taste for hairsplitting, I cannot swear that it was a
particularly small mouth. The lips were rather full than otherwise; one
saw in them potentialities of heroic passion, and tenderness, and
generosity, and, if you will, temper. No, her mouth was not in the least
like the pink shoe-button of romance and sugared portraiture; it was
manifestly designed less for simpering out of a gilt frame or the
dribbling of stock phrases over three hundred pages than for gibes and

laughter and cheery gossip and honest, unromantic eating, as well as
another purpose, which, as a highly dangerous topic, I decline even to
mention.
There you have the best description of Margaret Hugonin that I am
capable of giving you. No one realises its glaring inadequacy more
acutely than I.
Furthermore, I stipulate that if in the progress of our comedy she appear
to act with an utter lack of reason or even common-sense--as every
woman worth the winning must do once or twice in a lifetime--that I be
permitted to record the fact, to set it down in all its ugliness, nay, even
to exaggerate it a little--all to the end that I may eventually exasperate
you and goad you into crying out, "Come, come, you are not treating
the girl with common justice!"
For, if such a thing were possible, I should desire you to rival even me
in a liking for Margaret Hugonin. And speaking for myself, I can assure
you that I have come long ago to regard her faults with the same
leniency that I accord my own.

II
We begin on a fine May morning in Colonel Hugonin's rooms at
Selwoode, which is, as you may or may not know, the Hugonins'
country-place. And there we discover the Colonel dawdling over his
breakfast, in an intermediate stage of that careful toilet which enables
him later in the day to pass casual inspection as turning forty-nine.
At present the old gentleman is discussing the members of his
daughter's house-party. We will omit, by your leave, a number of
picturesque descriptive passages--for the Colonel is, on occasion, a man
of unfettered speech--and come hastily to the conclusion, to the
summing-up of the whole matter.
"Altogether," says Colonel Hugonin, "they strike me as being the most
ungodly menagerie ever gotten together under one roof since Noah

landed on Ararat."
Now, I am sorry that veracity compels me to present the Colonel in this
particular state of mind, for ordinarily