plentiful, and waved downward from her low forehead
in regular folds--but, to some tastes, it was dull and dead, in its
absolute want of glossiness, in its monotonous purity of plain light
color. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were just a shade darker than her
hair, and seemed made expressly for those violet-blue eyes, which assert
their most irresistible charm when associated with a fair complexion.
But it was here exactly that the promise of her face failed of
performance in the most startling manner. The eyes, which should have
been dark, were incomprehensibly and discordantly light; they were of
that nearly colorless gray which, though little attractive in itself,
possesses the rare compensating merit of interpreting the finest
gradations of thought, the gentlest changes of feeling, the deepest
trouble of passion, with a subtle transparency of expression which no
darker eyes can rival. Thus quaintly self-contradictory in the upper
part of her face, she was hardly less at variance with established ideas
of harmony in the lower. Her lips had the true feminine delicacy of
form, her cheeks the lovely roundness and smoothness of youth--but the
mouth was too large and firm, the chin too square and massive for her
sex and age. Her complexion partook of the pure monotony of tint which
characterized her hair--it was of the same soft, warm, creamy fairness
all over, without a tinge of color in the cheeks, except on occasions
of unusual bodily exertion or sudden mental disturbance. The whole
countenance--so remarkable in its strongly opposed characteristics--was
rendered additionally striking by its extraordinary mobility. The large,
electric, light-gray eyes were hardly ever in repose; all varieties of
expression followed each other over the plastic, ever-changing face,
with a giddy rapidity which left sober analysis far behind in the race.
The girl's exuberant vitality asserted itself all over her, from head to
foot. Her figure--taller than her sister's, taller than the average of
woman's height; instinct with such a seductive, serpentine suppleness,
so lightly and playfully graceful, that its movements suggested, not
unnaturally, the movements of a young cat--her figure was so perfectly
developed already that no one who saw her could have supposed that she
was only eighteen. She bloomed in the full physical maturity of twenty
years or more--bloomed naturally and irresistibly, in right of her
matchless health and strength. Here, i