Читать книгу Dr. Wainwright's Patient. A Novel онлайн

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"Oh, Mr. Douglas!"

"'Mr. Douglas,' Daisy!" said Paul Derinzy, with uplifted eyebrows; "'and why this courtesy,' as we say in Sir Walter Scott?"

"I mean Paul," said the girl; "but you startled me so, I scarcely knew what I said."

"Ah, 'Paul' is much better. The idea of your calling me anything else!"

"I don't know, I rather think you're 'Mr. Douglas' just now. You're always 'Mr. Douglas,' recollect, when I'm at all displeased with you, and I've lots of things for you to explain to-day."

"Fire away, child! Let's turn out of the path first, in amongst these trees. So--that is better. Now then, what is the first?--by Jove, pet, how stunning you look to-day!"

A vulgar but expressive term, and one in general acceptance ten years ago. One, too, by no means inexpressive of the girl's beauty, for she was beautiful, and in a style that was then uncommon. She had red hair. Nowadays red hair is by no means uncommon; it may be seen hanging in bunches in the coiffeurs' shops, and, with black roots, on the heads of most of the Dryads of the Wood. Ten years ago, to have red hair was to be subjected to chaff by the street-boys, to be called "carrots" by the vulgar, and to be pitied silently by the polite. Red hair au naturel was almost unknown--it was greased, and pomatumed, and cosmetiqued, and flattened into bandeaux, and twisted into ringlets, and deepened and darkened and disguised in every possible shape and way; it was "auburn," it was "chestnut," it was anything but red. This girl had red hair, and hated it, but was too proud to attempt to disguise it. So she wore it in a thick dry mass, heavy and crisp, and low on the forehead, and it suited her dead-white skin, creamy white, showing the rising blood on the smallest provocation, and her thin cheeks, and her pointed chin, and her gray eyes, and her long, but slightly impertinent, nose. No wonder people in the street turned round and stared at her; they had been educated up to the raven locks, and the short straight noses, and the rounded chin style of beauty, formed on the true classical model, and they could not understand this kind of thing except in a picture of Mr. Dante Rossetti, or young Mr. Millais, or some of those other new-fangled artists who, they supposed, were clever, but who were decidedly "odd."