races vanished during the three short steps she
took to cross the narrow hall between her husband's door and the one
opposite. Her expression was matter-of-course, rather than pathetic, as
she entered the pretty room where her daughter, half dressed, sat before
a dressing-table and played with the reflections of a three-leafed
mirror framed in blue enamel. That is, just before the moment of
her mother's entrance, Alice had been playing with the mirror's
reflections--posturing her arms and her expressions, clasping her hands
behind her neck, and tilting back her head to foreshorten the face in a
tableau conceived to represent sauciness, then one of smiling weariness,
then one of scornful toleration, and all very piquant; but as the door
opened she hurriedly resumed the practical, and occupied her hands in
the arrangement of her plentiful brownish hair.

They were pretty hands, of a shapeliness delicate and fine. "The best
things she's got!" a cold-blooded girl friend said of them, and meant
to include Alice's mind and character in the implied list of possessions
surpassed by the notable hands. However that may have been, the rest
of her was well enough. She was often called "a right pretty
girl"--temperate praise meaning a girl rather pretty than otherwise,
and this she deserved, to say the least. Even in repose she deserved
it, though repose was anything but her habit, being seldom seen upon
her except at home. On exhibition she led a life of gestures, the unkind
said to make her lovely hands more memorable; but all of her usually
accompanied the gestures of the hands, the shoulders ever giving them
their impulses first, and even her feet being called upon, at the same
time, for eloquence.

So much liveliness took proper place as only accessory to that of the
face, where her vivacity reached its climax; and it was unfortunate that
an ungifted young man, new in the town, should have attempted to define
the effect upon him of all this generosity of emphasis. He said that
"the way she used her cute hazel eyes and the wonderful glow of her
facial expression gave her a mighty spiritual quality." His actual
rendition of the word was "spirichul"; but it was not his pronunciation
that embalmed this outburst in the perennial laughter of Alice's girl
friends; they made the misfortune far less his than hers.

Her mother comforted her too heartily, insisting that Alice had "plenty
enough spiritual qualities," certainly more than