Her gestures were free, and
strikingly impressive. The whole woman was alive with a passionate
intensity, which I now perceived to be the phase in which her beauty
culminated. Any passion would have become her well; and passionate
love, perhaps, the best of all. This was not love, but anger,
largely intermixed with scorn. Yet the idea strangely forced itself
upon me, that there was a sort of familiarity between these two
companions, necessarily the result of an intimate love,--on Zenobia's
part, at least,--in days gone by, but which had prolonged itself into
as intimate a hatred, for all futurity. As they passed among the
trees, reckless as her movement was, she took good heed that even the
hem of her garment should not brush against the stranger's person. I
wondered whether there had always been a chasm, guarded so
religiously, betwixt these two.
As for Westervelt, he was not a whit more warmed by Zenobia's passion
than a salamander by the heat of its native furnace. He would have
been absolutely statuesque, save for a look of slight perplexity,
tinctured strongly with derision. It was a crisis in which his
intellectual perceptions could not altogether help him out. He
failed to comprehend, and cared but little for comprehending, why
Zenobia should put herself into such a fume; but satisfied his mind
that it was all folly, and only another shape of a woman's manifold
absurdity, which men can never understand. How many a woman's evil
fate has yoked her with a man like this! Nature thrusts some of us
into the world miserably incomplete on the emotional side, with
hardly any sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals.
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