At first sight of her, perhaps it was pre-eminently the shock of seeing anything so exquisite where he had expected to see nothing at all.For she was exquisite--horrid as have been the uses of the word, its best and truest belong to her; she was that and much more, from the ivory ferrule of the parasol she carried, to the light and slender footprint she left in the dust of the road.Joe knew at once that nothing like her had ever before been seen in Canaan.
He had little knowledge of the millinery arts, and he needed none to see the harmony--harmony like that of the day he had discovered a little while ago.Her dress and hat and gloves and parasol showed a pale lavender overtint like that which he had seen overspreading the western slope.(Afterward, he discovered that the gloves she wore that day were gray, and that her hat was for the most part white.) The charm of fabric and tint belonging to what she wore was no shame to her, not being of primal importance beyond herself; it was but the expression of her daintiness and the adjunct of it.She was tall, but if Joe could have spoken or thought of her as "slender," he would have been capable of calling her lips "red,"in which case he would not have been Joe, and would have been as far from the truth as her lips were from red, or as her supreme delicateness was from mere slenderness.
Under the summer hat her very dark hair swept back over her temples with something near trimness in the extent to which it was withheld from being fluffy.It may be that this approach to trimness, which was, after all, only a sort of coquetry with trimness, is the true key to the mystery of the vision of the lady who appeared to Joe.
Let us say that she suppressed everything that went beyond grace; that the hint of floridity was abhorrent to her."Trim" is as clumsy as "slender"; she had escaped from the trimness of girlhood as wholly as she had gone through its coltishness."Exquisite." Let us go back to Joe's own blurred first thought of her and be content with that!