Page:Kapalkundala (1919).djvu/58

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Kapalkundala.
53

mangos—let him pourtray a couple of small thin red lips like two streaks of scarlet, and, it is then, that he might have the impression of this fair stranger as the queen of beauty. Her eyes, though not wide, were full of brilliance and fringed with bowed lashes. The glance was steady but keen and searching. When the eyes are fixed upon you, you, at once, feel that this woman is probing the bottom of your heart. By degrees, the glaring intensity is apt to melt and the looks soften and become mellifluously affectionate. Sometimes, again, they bespeak certain languor and lassitude, born of voluptuous abandonment, appearing the soft dreamy bed of the blind baby-god with bow and arrows. At times, the eye-balls expand and dilate hot with desires full of amorous coyness. Again, they shoot up, at intervals, some sinister side-long glances resembling vivid flashes amidst dark clouds.

The face was lit up with two fine expressions—first, the forcefulness of an all-mastering intelligence,—secondly, an over-weening conceit. So, when she chanced to stand up imperiously and bend her swan-neck, she looked the right royal type of the feminist. She passed her seven-and-twenty summers—she the torrential river of the rich, ripe, golden autumn that has but set in. Her charms flowed and sparkled full to the brim, ready to break over the contents. The ripening fulness of those graces was more soul-enrapturing than the colour, the eye and all else besides. In her youthful sleekness, the whole frame coloured and quivered with a virility like the