pair of hair
bracelets with engraved gold clasps, gave her the nobleness and
simplicity of a Romney picture.

'_You_ do not find it so, I imagine,' he replied, bending forward to her
with a charming gesture of homage. He would have liked her to talk to
him of her work and her interests. He, too, mentally compared her to
Saint Elizabeth. He could almost have fancied the dark red flowers in
her white lap. But his comparison had another basis of feeling than
Rose's.

However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in which she
turned the conversation brought home to his own expansive confiding
nature a certain austerity and stiffness of fibre in her which for the
moment chilled him. But as he got her into talk about the neighbourhood,
the people and their ways, the impression vanished again, so far at
least as there was anything repellent about it. Austerity, strength,
individuality, all these words indeed he was more and more driven to
apply to her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. It was not
at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. Every now and then,
indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in what she said an absence
of a good many interests and attainments which in his ordinary
south-country women friends he would have assumed as a matter of course.

'I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she said to him
once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant story she had told
him with an episode in one of George Sand's Berry novels. It seemed to
him that she knew her Wordsworth by heart. And her own mountain life,
her own rich and meditative soul, had taught her judgments and comments
on her favourite poet which stirred Elsmere every now and then to
enthusiasm--so true they were and pregnant, so full often of a natural
magic of expression. On the other hand, when he quoted a very well-known
line of Shelley's she asked him where it came from. She seemed to him
deeper and simpler at every moment; her very limitations of sympathy and
knowledge, and they were evidently many, began to attract him. The
thought of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now
wonder, and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. Clearly she
was the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. And yet what purity,
what refinement, what delicate perception and self-restraint!

Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford.

'Were you ever there?' he asked her.

'Once,' she sa