The second episode of our featured weekend book.

chapter 2 of a phantom lover by vernon lee this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org

i feel that i cannot possibly reconstruct my earliest impressions of mrs oak my recollection of them would be entirely colored by my subsequent knowledge of her wins i conclude that i could not at first have experienced the strange interest and admiration which that extraordinary woman very soon excited in me interest and admiration be it well understood of a very unusual kind as she was herself a very unusual kind of woman and i if you choose am a rather unusual kind of man but i can explain that better and on this much is certain that i must have been immeasurably surprised at finding my hostess and future sitters so completely unlike everything i had anticipated or no now i come to think of it i scarcely felt surprised at all or if i did that shock of surprise could have lasted but an infinitesimal part of a minute the fact is that having once seen alice oak in the reality it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different there was something so complete so completely unlike everyone else in her personality that she seemed always to have been present in one's consciousness although present perhaps as an enigma let me try and give you some notion of her not that first impression whatever it may have been but the absolute reality of her as i gradually learn to see it to begin with i must repeat and reiterate over and over again that she was beyond all comparison the most graceful and exquisite woman i have ever seen but with a grace and an exquisiteness that had nothing to do with any preconceived notion or previous experience of what goes by these names grace and exquisiteness recognized at once as perfect but which were seen in her for the first time and probably i do believe for the last time it is conceivable is it not that once in a thousand years there may arise a combination of lines a system of movements an outline a gesture which is new unprecedented and yet hits off exactly our desires for beauty and rareness she was very tall and i suppose people would have called her thin i don't know for i never thought about her as a body bones flesh that sort of thing but merely as a wonderful series of lines and a wonderful strangeness of personality tall and slender certainly and with not one item of what makes up our notion of a well-built woman she was as straight i mean she had as little of what people call figure as a bamboo her shoulders were a trifle high and she had a decided stoop her arms and her shoulders she never once wore uncovered but this bamboo figure of hers had a suppleness any stateliness a play of outline with every step she took that i can't compare to anything else there was init something of the peacock and also something of this stag but above all it was her own i wish i could describe her i wish alas i wish i wish i have wished a hundred thousand times i could paint her as i see her now if i shut my eyes even if it were only a silhouette there i see her so plainly walking slowly up and down a room the slight highness of her shoulders just completing the exquisite arrangement of lines made by the straight supple back the long exquisite neck the head with the hair cropped in short pale curls always drooping a little except when she would suddenly throw it back and smile not at me nor had anyone nor had anything that had been said but as if she alone had suddenly seen or heard something with a strange dimple in her thin pale cheeks and the strange whiteness of her full wide opened eyes the moment when she had something of this stag in her movement but where is the use of talking about her i don't believe you know that even the greatest painter can show what is the real beauty of a very beautiful woman in the ordinary...