ase is, she came out, she was assuredly fair to see. She was
slight and dark of hair, her face was like the cameo of a Neapolitan
boy, but her eyes were not black, they were of that sultry blue which is
observable in the ascension of tobacco-smoke through a sunbeam; and
about her mouth and in the carriage of her head was something that
reminded you of the alertness and expectancy of a bird. She was not
innocent, if innocence be taken in the sense of ignorance, but she was
clean of mind, of eye, and of tongue. She had been better instructed
than the majority of society girls, or, if not better instructed, at
least she had read more, and this perhaps, because on emerging from the
nursery her father's first care had been to make her unafraid of books.

Petrus Menemon himself was a tall, spare man, scrupulous as to his
dress, and quiet of manner. In his face was the expression of one who is
not altogether satisfied, and yet wishes everyone else to be content. He
had an acquired ignorance which he called agnosticism. He enjoyed the
formidable reputation of being well-read; but it is only just to explain
that he was well read chiefly in the archaic sense--in the bores and
pedants of antiquity. Yet, if his taste was stilted, he made no effort
to inculcate that taste in his daughter; he gave her the run of the
library and allowed her to drag from the Valhalla of the back
books-helves what friends and relatives she chose. Indeed, his attitude
to her was one of habitual indulgence. By nature she was as capricious
as a day in February, a compound of sunlight, of promise, and of snow;
and when she was wilful--and she was often that--he made no effort to
coerce, he argued with her as one might with a grown person, seriously,
and without anger. And something of that seriousness she caught from
him, and with it confidence in his wisdom and trust in his love. To her
thinking no one in all the world was superior to that gentle-mannered
man.

When she left the nursery she was supplied with a governess, and as she
grew older, with masters of different arts and tongues. But as a child
she was often lonely, and the children whom she saw playing in the
streets were to her objects of indignant envy. On Sunday it was her
father's custom to take her to morning service, and afterward to her
grandmother, a lady who lived alone in a giant house in South Washington
Square, in the upper rooms of which the child was persuaded that coffins
lay stored