The sun had moved down to a pleasant position.  It rested just below the line of trees in the park.  Claudia lowered her parasol to rest on her shoulder where she forgot about it.  The park smelled of flowers and damp leaves.  The sky was still bright with afternoon sunlight but the cool of evening had started to descend.  In short there was hardly to be found a better day to take a walk.

            Claudia glanced to the side at Victor.  He was telling her about his house out in the country.  She wasn’t listening but she did occasionally look over at him to give some sort of impression that she might be listening.  He fit perfectly into her perfect walk.  He was beautiful like she pictured an angel being.  Not like the angels looked in church.  Those always looked too much like women or children to her.  Surely God would not entrust womanly creatures with any sort of power.  Not if life as they lived it was any evidence.  So angels must be masculine and Victor was that.

            Claudia’s younger brother, Julian, darted out behind them and streaked out across the neatly trimmed grass.  It was a park designed more for lovers’ strolls than children.  Julian was bored, Claudia could tell, but he had wanted to come.  Then, Dorothea had come and it was probably just that Julian didn’t want to get left behind all alone.

            Dorothea bustled past them, apologizing.  Claudia laughed.

            “Your smile is beautiful,” Victor said.  It came out like an observation not a compliment.  “How I wish I could make you smile like that, my Claudia.”

            Claudia turned her face to him.  “I do not see why you could not.”

            He was dizzyingly beautiful.  She caught her breath as her eyes took him in, surrounded by the cultured garden.  More honeyed words passed from his lips but Claudia did not hear them.  She was too lost in his dark pale beauty.  He truly was everything the other girls and she had ever gushed about.  He spoke in poetry, looked like an angel-man, had money and breeding. 

            She didn’t know a single other girl who’d done so well.  Nor did she think anyone she knew was likely too.  All the other girls her age were already married or the sort who wasn’t likely to catch a husband at all. 

            “There now, you are smiling again but I could hardly say why.”

            “It is simply being here with you, Victor.”  Claudia lowered her eyes and spiraled her parasol.  Claudia looked away and began to walk.  She felt no urge to talk to Victor.  If she’d thought about it Claudia might have found that strange.  With anyone else she would have been burbling about the upcoming engagement party.  Or she would have been talking about the wedding.  There were so many things that Claudia could have been talking about but the truth was she found more appeal in talking to a painting than to her work-of-art fiancée.  He was something beautiful, surreal, untrusted and mythical.  He was certainly not real or human to her. 

            So she walked along at this beautiful creature’s side as he spoke words spun from girlhood fancy.  She glanced beside her into his flawless face.  She thought about how happy she was to have him and how jealous the other girls would be.  Yet she remained removed from him. She was in her world, filled with feminine things, uncertainty, obedience and fear and he remained outside of that world. 

Title Reference:
*Joseph Conrad "Heart of Darkness" Dover publications, Inc 3rd Edition. 1990: 10