with an added
amplitude of person on which middle age had set its seal, seemed to
present her insistently as a daughter of the south, or still more of the
east, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and
waited upon by slaves. She looked as if her most active effort might be
to take up, as she lay back, her mandolin, or to share a sugared fruit
with a pet gazelle. She was in fact, however, neither a pampered Jewess
nor a lazy Creole; New York had been, recordedly, her birthplace and
"Europe" punctually her discipline. She wore yellow and purple because
she thought it better, as she said, while one was about it, to look like
the Queen of Sheba than like a revendeuse; she put pearls in her hair
and crimson and gold in her tea-gown for the same reason: it was her
theory that nature itself had overdressed her and that her only course
was to drown, as it was hopeless to try to chasten, the overdressing.
So she was covered and surrounded with "things," which were frankly toys
and shams, a part of the amusement with which she rejoiced to supply
her friends. These friends were in the game that of playing with the
disparity between her aspect and her character. Her character was
attested by the second movement of her face, which convinced the
beholder that her vision of the humours of the world was not supine,
not passive. She enjoyed, she needed the warm air of friendship, but the
eyes of the American city looked out, somehow, for the opportunity
of it, from under the lids of Jerusalem. With her false indolence, in
short, her false leisure, her false pearls and palms and courts and
fountains, she was a person for whom life was multitudinous detail,
detail that left her, as it at any moment found her, unappalled and
unwearied.

"Sophisticated as I may appear"--it was her frequent phrase--she had
found sympathy her best resource. It gave her plenty to do; it made her,
as she also said, sit up. She had in her life two great holes to fill,
and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had
known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk
into the baskets in which they collected the material for some eventual
patchwork quilt.

One of these gaps in Mrs. Assingham's completeness was her want of
children; the other was her want of wealth. It was wonderful how little
either, in the fulness of time, came to show; sympathy and curiosity
could render their objects practically