a
well-furnished breakfast-table, standing in the middle of a long room,
with many windows in it. I looked from the table to the window
farthest from me, and saw a lady standing at it, with her back turned
towards me. The instant my eyes rested on her, I was struck by the
rare beauty of her form, and by the unaffected grace of her attitude.
Her figure was tall, yet not too tall; comely and well-developed, yet
not fat; her head set on her shoulders with an easy, pliant firmness;
her waist, perfection in the eyes of a man, for it occupied its natural
place, it filled out its natural circle, it was visibly and
delightfully undeformed by stays. She had not heard my entrance into
the room; and I allowed myself the luxury of admiring her for a few
moments, before I moved one of the chairs near me, as the least
embarrassing means of attracting her attention. She turned towards me
immediately. The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body
as soon as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in
a flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the
window--and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward a
few steps--and I said to myself, The lady is young. She approached
nearer--and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise which words fail
me to express), The lady is ugly!

Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more
flatly contradicted--never was the fair promise of a lovely figure more
strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that crowned it.
The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the dark down on her
upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine
mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing, resolute brown eyes; and thick,
coal-black hair, growing unusually low down on her forehead. Her
expression--bright, frank, and intelligent--appeared, while she was
silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of
gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest
woman alive is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on
shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model--to be charmed by
the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs
betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled
by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the
perfectly shaped figure ended--was to feel a sensation oddly akin to
the helpless discomfort