Explore "The Storm Centre" by Mary Noailles Murfree on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Now, face to face with the long-sought opportunity, Colonel Ashley was grievously disappointed. A woman -- young, singularly beautiful, dressed like a middle-aged frump, with the manners of a matron of fifty, staid, reserved, inattentive, uninterested!
The incongruity affected him like a discourtesy; its rarity had no attractions for him, nor in the slightest degree roused his curiosity. He had expected charm, glow, responsiveness, coquetry, -- all the various traits that attend on beauty and youth. Even a conscious hauteur would have had its special grace and piqued an effort to win her to cordiality, but here was the inexpressiveness, the indifference, of an elderly woman, one tired, despondent, done with the world -- civil, indeed, as behooved her rearing, her station, but unnoting -- really apart from all the interests of the present and all thought for the future. And, certainly, Mrs. Gwynn's life might be considered already lived out in her past.