ed no venture, and which seemed to her triflingly garish
and even profaning to the hallowed delicacy of the inner nature.

It was so strange to me that Palgray did not see this through every
lineament of her marvelous beauty. There was a glow under her skin,
but no color--an effect of paleness--fair as the lotus-leaf, but
warmer and brighter, and which came through the alabaster fineness of
the grain, like something the eye cannot define, but which we know by
some spirit-perception to be the effluence of purer existence, the
breathing through, as it were, of the luminous tenanting of an angel.
To this glowing paleness, with golden hair, I never had seen united
any but a disposition of predominant melancholy; and it seemed to me
dull indeed otherwise to read it. But there were other betrayals of
the same inner nature of Stephania. Her lips, cut with the fine
tracery of the penciling upon a tulip-cup, were of a slender and
delicate fullness, expressive of a mind which took--(of the
senses)--only so much life as would hold down the spirit during its
probation; and when this spiritual mouth was at rest, no painter has
ever drawn lips on which lay more of the unutterable pensiveness of
beauty which we dream to have been Mary's, in the childhood of Jesus.
A tear in the heart was the instinctive answer to Stephania's every
look when she did not smile; and her large, soft, slowly-lifting eyes,
were to any elevated perception, it seemed to me, most eloquent of
tenderness as tearful as it was unfathomable and angelic.

I shall have failed, however, in portraying truly the being of whom I
am thus privileged to hold the likeness in my memory, if the reader
fancies her to have nurtured her pensive disposition at the expense of
a just value for real life, or a full development of womanly feelings.
It was a peculiarity of her beauty, to my eye, that, with all her
earnest leaning toward a thoughtful existence, there did not seem to
be one vein beneath her pearly skin, not one wavy line in her
faultless person, that did not lend its proportionate consciousness to
her breathing sense of life. Her bust was of the slightest fullness
which the sculptor would choose for the embodying of his ideal of the
best blending of modesty with complete beauty; and her throat and
arms--oh, with what an inexpressible pathos of loveliness, so to
speak, was moulded, under an infantine dewiness of surface, their
delicate undulations. No one could be in her