Excerpt from The Inscrutable Lovers: A Tragic Comedy

Marlborough Street, invariably arrived at five minutes to twelve.

Count Kettle, a Papal Count, was a middle aged man, graceful and accomplished. He moved through life as though it were something which must be borne. It was said that he was a great scholar, but there was nothing of the pedant in his behaviour. He had brilliant eyes, dark grey, and a silky beard, unnaturally black, which contrasted with his pallid com plexion. His smile was a rare thing, melan choly yet ironical. He was punctiliously courteous, and his self-control was remarkable. I regarded him as one of those self-effacing, natural men, whom the world attacks with every advantage in its favour. The spirit of intellectual Ireland was incarnate in him.

His daughter was graceful, too - 'a pretty, shy girl, rather tall, with a faintly wrinkled forehead, as though something had perplexed her. She had soft eyes, like dark pansies, which seemed gently to reproach the world for withholding something that was her right. She was unmistakably convent-bred and would have attracted attention in an English drawing-room.. That counted for little in Dublin, where, as Queen Victoria is reported to have said, All the ladies are Queens.

N o. The attraction which she exercised lay rather in the fact that there was something provocative about her. She seemed to appeal for comprehension, to encourage the dullest wits to pierce the enigma of her character, as if that enigma were not by any means insoluble. Her sensitive face, capped with much brown hair, silky like her father's, was distinguished by her nose. It was small but quaintly determined. She must have been about twenty when I first saw her.

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