Wormwood Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. I May as well speak of this woman Heloise St. Cyr, before I go on any further. I say this woman; I could never call her a girl, though she was young enough?only twenty. But she was so pale and quiet, and so concentrated within the mystic circle of her own thoughts, that she never seemed to me like others of her sex and age. At first I took a strong dislike to her; she had such fair bright hair, and I hated golden-haired women. I suppose this was because writers ?poets especially?have sung their praises of golden hair till the world is wearied,? and also because so many females of the demi-monde have dyed their coarse tresses to such hideous straw-tints in order to be in accordance with the prevailing fashion andsentiment. However, the abundant locks of Hdloiise were, in their way, of a matchless hue; a singularly pale gold, brightening here and there into flecks of reddish auburn close to the smooth nape of her neck, where they grew in soft small curls like the delicate fluff under a young bird's wing. I often caught myself staring at these little warm rings of sun-colour on the milky whiteness of her skin, when she sat in a window-corner apart from myself and Pauline, reading some great volume of history or poetry, entirely absorbed, and apparently unconscious of our presence. Her uncle told me she was a wonderful scholar; that she had numberless romances in her head, and all the poets in her heart. I remember I thought at the time that he was exaggerating her gifts out of mere affectionate complaisance, for I never quite believed in woman's real aptitude for learning. I could quite understand a certain surface-brilliancy of attainment in the female mind, but I would never admitthat such knowledge went deep enough to last. I was mistaken of course ; since then I have real...Read More