One made one's start with the Tudors ... . This had been the age in which ends were dire; she learned from small placards adjoining the gold frames how very often,if not invariably, initiative, recalcitrance, ambition, ill-spent beauty or indomitability carried their possessors to the block, or, in cases of bishops, to the stake. The over-clever had perished along with the over-brave, not deterring others from doing likewise. Brittle, bejewelled fingers and cobweb lace ornamented the surface only: one was in an internally maniacal, autocratic, dolichocephalic labyrinth. Inexorable pupil-darkened eyes, fumily burning and set in high up and energetically compressed lips stabbed at her ...
She went through a doorway into the Stuart area of th betrayers and betrayed, of whom the majority, less taut than those in the rooms before, had a free-flowing lavishness and engagingness. Their look of importance--for it was evident that important they were--was etherealized by a graceful, in some cases a glowing, in others a melancholic pensiveness, which made not the youths only appear young. Fatal was to be the division between their fortunes, yet who could guess?
--Elizabeth Bowen, Evas Trout 194 (Vintage 1999) .
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