isite neatness.

We have seen her before as the lady in the pearl-coloured robe; but
seen now at home she looks much younger. She was one of those whom,
encountered in the streets or in society, one might guess to be
married,--probably a young bride; for thus seen there was about her an
air of dignity and of self-possession which suits well with the ideal of
chaste youthful matronage; and in the expression of the face there was a
pensive thoughtfulness beyond her years. But as she now sat by the open
window arranging flowers in a glass bowl, a book lying open on her lap,
you would never have said, "What a handsome woman!" you would have said,
"What a charming girl!" All about her was maidenly, innocent, and fresh.
The dignity of her bearing was lost in household ease, the pensiveness
of her expression in an untroubled serene sweetness.

Perhaps many of my readers may have known friends engaged in some
absorbing cause of thought, and who are in the habit when they go out,
especially if on solitary walks, to take that cause of thought with
them. The friend may be an orator meditating his speech, a poet his
verses, a lawyer a difficult case, a physician an intricate malady. If
you have such a friend, and you observe him thus away from his home, his
face will seem to you older and graver. He is absorbed in the care that
weighs on him. When you see him in a holiday moment at his own
fireside, the care is thrown aside; perhaps he mastered while abroad the
difficulty that had troubled him; he is cheerful, pleasant, sunny. This
appears to be very much the case with persons of genius. When in their
own houses we usually find them very playful and childlike. Most
persons of real genius, whatever they may seem out of doors, are very
sweet-tempered at home, and sweet temper is sympathizing and genial in
the intercourse of private life. Certainly, observing this girl as she
now bends over the flowers, it would be difficult to believe her to be
the Isaura Cicogna whose letters to Madame de Grantinesnil exhibit the
doubts and struggles of an unquiet, discontented, aspiring mind. Only
in one or two passages in those letters would you have guessed at the
writer in the girl as we now see her. It is in those passages where she
expresses her love of harmony, and her repugnance to contest: those were
characteristics you might have read in her face.

Certainly the girl is very lovely: what long dark eyelashes! what
soft, tender, dark-blue