He liked Helen's way of talking about people; they knew an interminable array of them, many involved in enlivening complications, yet Helen never gossiped; the musing impersonality and impartiality with which she commented and surmised lifted her themes to a realm almost of art; she was pungent, yet never malicious, and the tolerant lucidity of her insight was almost benign.
Her narrow face, leaning back in its dark aureole of hair, her strange eyes and bitter-sweet lips--all dimmed, as it were, by drowsiness and smoke, and yet never more intelligently awake than at these nocturnal hours--remained with him as most typical of Helen's most significant and charming self.

It was her aspect of mystery and that faint hint of bitterness that he found so charming; Helen herself he never thought of as mysterious.

Mystery was a mere outward asset of her beauty, like the powdery surface of a moth's wing.

He didn't think of Helen as mysterious, perhaps because he thought little about her at all; he only looked and listened while she made him think about everything but herself, and he felt always happy and altogether at ease in her presence.

There seemed, indeed, no reason for thinking about a person whom one had known all one's life long.
And Helen was more than the best of company and the loveliest of objects; she was at once comrade and counsellor.