Her head, extremely fair and exquisitely festal, was like a happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on an old precious medal, some silver coin of the Renaissance; while her slim lightness and brightness, her gaiety, her expression, her decision, contributed to an effect that might have been felt by a poet as half mythological and half conventional.

He could have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist-high in the summer surge.

Above all she suggested to him the reflexion that the femme du monde--in these finest developments of the type--was, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed various and multifold.
She had aspects, characters, days, nights--or had them at least, showed them by a mysterious law of her own, when in addition to everything she happened also to be a woman of genius.

She was an obscure person, a muffled person one day, and a showy person, an uncovered person the next.

He thought of Madame de Vionnet to-night as showy and uncovered, though he felt the formula rough, because, thanks to one of the short-cuts of genius she had taken all his categories by surprise.
Twice during dinner he had met Chad's eyes in a longish look; but these communications had in truth only stirred up again old ambiguities--so little was it clear from them whether they were an appeal or an admonition.