{"product_id":"2940015495911","title":"The Penance of Portia James","description":"An excerpt from the beginning of:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChapter I\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePORTIA JAMES had been as good as her word, and, notwithstanding the fact that she had danced the evening before—Portia loved dancing—until the grey dawn was actually creeping into the gas-lit rooms, she was standing only five hours later, that is to say at eight o'clock the same morning, on the steps of Burlington House, waiting with a few other enthusiasts until the doors should be opened. To face the unsparing morning light after having made what is suggestively called a night of it, is not an experiment that can be entered upon becomingly after the freshness of youth is past. Portia, however, was still of an age to stand this test—and, what is more, to come out of it triumphantly. It was her first season in London. She had abundant health; pleasure and admiration seemed to act upon her as stimulants, and though she had never slept so little or lived (in the sense that living may be measured by keenness of sensation) so much as hitherto, she had never looked fresher, younger, rosier, or more generally blooming, than upon this particular June morning, as she stood waiting with the thick catalogue in her hand, a confident Peri, outside the gates of the particular Paradise she had flown from her bed at that early hour to enter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYouth and the morning were ever well mated. Did not the Greeks, those wonderful pantheists, recognise this truth when they invoked the ever—young Aurora to coax their world into waking life with the aid of her rosy finger-tips? A certain young artist, who was hardly as yet out of the rapin stage, and who had seen Portia a few evenings before in the glory of full décolleté with rounded bust and arms emerging from old-rose satin—or something equally vague and charming as regarded its hue—and who had thought on that occasion of Byron's lines upon the score of beauty,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Mellowed to that tender light.\u003cbr\u003eWhich Heaven to gaudy day denies,\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003efound himself inclined at the present moment to alter his opinion. He had reached the Academy a little before Portia, and had watched her unobserved as she mounted the steps. His eye, accustomed to transfer to an imaginary canvas all that it encountered, took in every detail of her appearance at a glance. The misty background of the London atmosphere, which looked as though at least two of the well-known Egyptian plagues, to wit, the reign of darkness and the rain of blood, were struggling for supremacy over it—the simple explanation thereof being that the sun's rays were striving to penetrate a threatening fog—gave the indefiniteness of outline that stamps an impressionest picture to her silhouette, as she walked. Nevertheless, Harry Tolhurst, with the divination that comes of artistic training, was aware, as I have said, of all the details of it. Portia had a figure that might have inspired a Swinburnian rhapsody, and Harry did full justice to this in his mind as she walked up the steps in a tailor-made Scotch tweed that sat closely, but not tightly, round her exquisite form. Her bright head was covered with one of those patulous splashes of black lace that serve as a substratum for a garland of flowers. Perhaps it was not quite in keeping with the tailor-made dress, but it harmonised wonderfully well with the face that it framed; and this mention of her face brings me to the most difficult part of my description, for the face is supposed by most to be the crucial test or criterion by which beauty is to be gauged. Portia, it must be owned at once, did not possess what might be called, objectively speaking, a beautiful face. It was a face that did not focus well, as the photographers say, and those of her acquaintances who had only seen her photograph were agreeably surprised when they encountered the original. In the photographs the face was deprived of the very qualities that constituted its principal charm—namely, softness of colouring and mobility of expression. What is the loveliest landscape under a grey sky compared with the same landscape when the clouds and the sunlight sweep across it, revealing a thousand unsuspected charms? Portia in her photographs was the landscape on a sunless day. Portia in her own person was the landscape on a day of April showers, of summer storms, of autumn moons, of all that makes inanimate nature live and vibrate with human passion. To certain people, therefore—to those who could awake corresponding phases in her—she was subjectively beautiful; and for the fact that her eyes—of the warm hazel that accompanies chestnut hair—were too wide apart; that her nose was too short, or her mouth too large, they cared not one whit. Her eyes, as some of them had discovered to their cost, could \"thoroughly undo\" them betimes—and what could the most beautiful eyes of the most beautiful houri in an Eastern Paradise do more?—...","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47070925619440,"sku":"2940015495911","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940015495911_p0.jpg?v=1763629047","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940015495911","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}