f colour and stubborn
resistances of cut, wonderous encounters in which the art of the toilet
seemed to lay down its life. She had the tread of a grenadier and the
voice of an angel.

In the course of a walk with her the day after my arrival I found myself
grabbing her arm with sudden and undue familiarity. I had been struck
by the beauty of a face that approached us and I was still more affected
when I saw the face, at the sight of my companion, open like a window
thrown wide. A smile fluttered out of it as brightly as a drapery
dropped from a sill--a drapery shaken there in the sun by a young lady
flanked with two young men, a wonderful young lady who, as we drew
nearer, rushed up to Mrs. Meldrum with arms flourished for an embrace.
My immediate impression of her had been that she was dressed in
mourning, but during the few moments she stood talking with our friend
I made more discoveries. The figure from the neck down was meagre, the
stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as
the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it. This
was a little person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance
to paint. The head, the features, the colour, the whole facial oval and
radiance had a wonderful purity; the deep grey eyes--the most agreeable,
I thought, that I had ever seen--brushed with a kind of winglike grace
every object they encountered. Their possessor was just back from
Boulogne, where she had spent a week with dear Mrs. Floyd-Taylor: this
accounted for the effusiveness of her reunion with dear Mrs. Meldrum.
Her black garments were of the freshest and daintiest; she suggested a
pink-and-white wreath at a showy funeral. She confounded us for three
minutes with her presence; she was a beauty of the great conscious,
public, responsible order. The young men, her companions, gazed at her
and grinned: I could see there were very few moments of the day at which
young men, these or others, would not be so occupied. The people who
approached took leave of their manners; every one seemed to linger
and gape. When she brought her face close to Mrs. Mel-drum's--and she
appeared to be always bringing it close to somebody's--it was a marvel
that objects so dissimilar should express the same general identity,
the unmistakable character of the English gentlewoman. Mrs. Meldrum
sustained the comparison with her usual courage, but I wondered why she
didn't introduce me: I should have