from the Greek mother, a
counteracting languor of temperament and an antique cast of mind.

Such, in a measure, was Hyacinthe King at twenty--a curious compound
of beauty, unspent _verve_, irritated longings, half-superstitious
imaginings, and half-developed impulses, ideas and mental powers;
practically, an assistant to the worn mother in her household duties,
a haunter of the beautiful places in the city of her adoption, an
occasional mingler in the scant festivities of artists, a good
linguist, knowing English thoroughly and speaking French and German
with fluent accuracy. Watch her, with me, as she walks one spring day
along the narrow Via Robbia, down which a slip of sunlight glints
scantily on her young head, and, emerging into a wider thoroughfare,
ascends at last the Scala Regia of the Vatican. The girl is known
there, and the usually not over-courteous officials allow her to pass
on at her will through hall after hall of splendor and priceless
treasure. She is neither an English tourist with Baedeker, Murray and
a note-book, nor an American traveller with pencil, loose leaves and
a possible photographic apparatus in her pocket: therefore to the
vigilant eye of the guardian of the pope's palace she is an innocuous
being. Hyacinthe glides quietly through the Clementino Museum, with
never a glance for the lovely, blooming Mercury of the Belvedere, or
even one peep in at the cabinet where the sad Laocooen for ever writhes
in impotent struggles, or a look of love for rare and radiant Apollo,
or one of surprise for Hercules with the Nemean lion. She has reached
the Hall of Statues--that superb gallery with its subtly-tesselated
pavement, its grand marble columns with their Ionic capitals, its
arches and walls of wondrous marbles--and here she stops with a little
sigh before the Cupid of Praxiteles, shorn of his wings by ruthless
Time or some still more ruthless human destroyer. But oh the
lovesomeness of that wingless Love, the sensuous psalmody that seems
about to part the young lips, and the glad eyes one may fancy glancing
under that careless infant brow! Hyacinthe stands before it a long,
long time while many parties come in and go out, and only moves on a
little when an insolent young Frenchman offers a surmise as to her
being a statue herself. She moves only as far as Ariadne: the _jeune
Francais_ has made a progressive movement also, and notes behind his
Paris hat to his companion that the girl looks somethin