human
When the Salon opened we went there, and I saw a painting every one was talking about--by a new artist. It was called 'Bella Donna,' just a woman's head and shoulders. Max, _she was like me_! But she was horrible, wicked--somehow deformed, though you couldn't see how. You only felt it. And besides being like me, she was like a lynx. There was one in the Zoo in London, with just her expression. Jack and I saw it together, and he laughed, and said now he knew who my first ancestress was. He didn't say anything about my looking like 'Bella Donna,' but I knew he must have thought it. He got me away from the picture as soon as he could, but I couldn't forget. The lynx-face, with the yellow eyes and red hair like mine, haunted me. I began to dream of my child being born like that--a girl, deformed in the horrid, mysterious way that you could only feel. I could never go to sleep again on a night after the dream. I suppose I looked pale; and he worried, and the doctors advised the country. We had some friends who'd just come back from the Loire, and they told us about a wonderful château there that was to be rented furnished. It belonged to an old family named de la Tour, who had lost their money. They had a romantic, tragic sort of history that interested us, especially Jack, so we went to see the place. There were vineyards badly cultivated, and a forest, and some shooting, too; and we took it for a few months. But we hadn't been there many weeks when a telegram came to Jack from Edwin Reeves. Edwin acted for him even then. It was important, on account of some business, for Jack to go home. He would have answered that it was impossible, but I said, why not go? I was safe, and he could be back in a month or five weeks. I had old Anne Wickham with me, and she'd been my nurse when I was a little girl, you know, and my maid afterward, till she died. You can remember her.