Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders

8. CHAPTER VIII. (continued)

"Ah! you have noticed those," she said, seeing that Grace's eyes were attracted by some curious objects against the walls. "They are man-traps. My husband was a connoisseur in man-traps and spring-guns and such articles, collecting them from all his neighbors. He knew the histories of all these--which gin had broken a man's leg, which gun had killed a man. That one, I remember his saying, had been set by a game-keeper in the track of a notorious poacher; but the keeper, forgetting what he had done, went that way himself, received the charge in the lower part of his body, and died of the wound. I don't like them here, but I've never yet given directions for them to be taken away." She added, playfully, "Man-traps are of rather ominous significance where a person of our sex lives, are they not?"

Grace was bound to smile; but that side of womanliness was one which her inexperience had no great zest in contemplating.

"They are interesting, no doubt, as relics of a barbarous time happily past," she said, looking thoughtfully at the varied designs of these instruments of torture--some with semi-circular jaws, some with rectangular; most of them with long, sharp teeth, but a few with none, so that their jaws looked like the blank gums of old age.

"Well, we must not take them too seriously," said Mrs. Charmond, with an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When she had shown her visitor different articles in cabinets that she deemed likely to interest her, some tapestries, wood-carvings, ivories, miniatures, and so on--always with a mien of listlessness which might either have been constitutional, or partly owing to the situation of the place--they sat down to an early cup of tea.

"Will you pour it out, please? Do," she said, leaning back in her chair, and placing her hand above her forehead, while her almond eyes--those long eyes so common to the angelic legions of early Italian art--became longer, and her voice more languishing. She showed that oblique-mannered softness which is perhaps most frequent in women of darker complexion and more lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmond's was; who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents rather than steer.