ures took a sharpness that, however regular, had
something chilling and severe: the mouth was small, but the lips were
thin and pale, and had an expression of effort and contraction which
added to the distrust that her sidelong glance was calculated to
inspire. The teeth were dazzlingly white, but sharp and thin, and the
eye-teeth were much longer than the rest. The complexion was pale,
but without much delicacy,--the paleness seemed not natural to it, but
rather that hue which study and late vigils give to men; so that she
wanted the freshness and bloom of youth, and looked older than she
was,--an effect confirmed by an absence of roundness in the cheek not
noticeable in the profile, but rendering the front face somewhat
harsh as well as sharp. In a word, the face and the figure were not in
harmony: the figure prevented you from pronouncing her to be masculine;
the face took from the figure the charm of feminacy. It was the head of
the young Augustus upon the form of Agrippina. One touch more, and
we close a description which already perhaps the reader may consider
frivolously minute. If you had placed before the mouth and lower part of
the face a mask or bandage, the whole character of the upper face would
have changed at once,--the eye lost its glittering falseness, the brow
its sinister contraction; you would have pronounced the face not only
beautiful, but sweet and womanly. Take that bandage suddenly away and
the change would have startled you, and startled you the more because
you could detect no sufficient defect or disproportion in the lower part
of the countenance to explain it. It was as if the mouth was the key
to the whole: the key nothing without the text, the text uncomprehended
without the key.

Such, then, was Lucretia Clavering in outward appearance at the age of
twenty,--striking to the most careless eye; interesting and perplexing
the student in that dark language never yet deciphered,--the human
countenance. The reader must have observed that the effect every face
that he remarks for the first time produces is different from the
impression it leaves upon him when habitually seen. Perhaps no two
persons differ more from each other than does the same countenance in
our earliest recollection of it from the countenance regarded in the
familiarity of repeated intercourse. And this was especially the case
with Lucretia Clavering's: the first impulse of nearly all who beheld it
was distrust that partook of