Dronsart: this is a Belgian, rather low of stature, in form heavy,
with broad waist, short neck and limbs, good red and white complexion,
features well chiselled and regular, well-cut eyes of a clear brown
colour, light brown hair, good teeth, age not much above fifteen, but as
full-grown as a stout young Englishwoman of twenty. This portrait gives
the idea of a somewhat dumpy but good-looking damsel, does it not? Well,
when I looked along the row of young heads, my eye generally stopped at
this of Adele's; her gaze was ever waiting for mine, and it frequently
succeeded in arresting it. She was an unnatural-looking being--so young,
fresh, blooming, yet so Gorgon-like. Suspicion, sullen ill-temper were
on her forehead, vicious propensities in her eye, envy and panther-like
deceit about her mouth. In general she sat very still; her massive shape
looked as if it could not bend much, nor did her large head--so broad
at the base, so narrow towards the top--seem made to turn readily on her
short neck. She had but two varieties of expression; the prevalent one
a forbidding, dissatisfied scowl, varied sometimes by a most pernicious
and perfidious smile. She was shunned by her fellow-pupils, for, bad as
many of them were, few were as bad as she.

Aurelia and Adele were in the first division of the second class; the
second division was headed by a pensionnaire named Juanna Trista. This
girl was of mixed Belgian and Spanish origin; her Flemish mother was
dead, her Catalonian father was a merchant residing in the ---- Isles,
where Juanna had been born and whence she was sent to Europe to be
educated. I wonder that any one, looking at that girl's head and
countenance, would have received her under their roof. She had precisely
the same shape of skull as Pope Alexander the Sixth; her organs
of benevolence, veneration, conscientiousness, adhesiveness, were
singularly small, those of self-esteem, firmness, destructiveness,
combativeness, preposterously large; her head sloped up in the penthouse
shape, was contracted about the forehead, and prominent behind; she
had rather good, though large and marked features; her temperament was
fibrous and bilious, her complexion pale and dark, hair and eyes black,
form angular and rigid but proportionate, age fifteen.

Juanna was not very thin, but she had a gaunt visage, and her "regard"
was fierce and hungry; narrow as was her brow, it presented space enough
for the legible graving of two words