-eyed, silken-tressed, and silver-tongued, would have shrunk
appalled. She had passed alone through protracted scenes of suffering,
exercised rigid self-denial, made large sacrifices of time, money,
health for those who had repaid her only by ingratitude, and now her
main--almost her sole--fault was that she was censorious.

Censorious she certainly was. Caroline had not sat five minutes ere her
hostess, still keeping her under the spell of that dread and Gorgon
gaze, began flaying alive certain of the families in the neighbourhood.
She went to work at this business in a singularly cool, deliberate
manner, like some surgeon practising with his scalpel on a lifeless
subject. She made few distinctions; she allowed scarcely any one to be
good; she dissected impartially almost all her acquaintance. If her
auditress ventured now and then to put in a palliative word she set it
aside with a certain disdain. Still, though thus pitiless in moral
anatomy, she was no scandal-monger. She never disseminated really
malignant or dangerous reports. It was not her heart so much as her
temper that was wrong.

Caroline made this discovery for the first time to-day, and moved
thereby to regret divers unjust judgments she had more than once passed
on the crabbed old maid, she began to talk to her softly, not in
sympathizing words, but with a sympathizing voice. The loneliness of her
condition struck her visitor in a new light, as did also the character
of her ugliness--a bloodless pallor of complexion, and deeply worn lines
of feature. The girl pitied the solitary and afflicted woman; her looks
told what she felt. A sweet countenance is never so sweet as when the
moved heart animates it with compassionate tenderness. Miss Mann, seeing
such a countenance raised to her, was touched in her turn. She
acknowledged her sense of the interest thus unexpectedly shown in her,
who usually met with only coldness and ridicule, by replying to her
candidly. Communicative on her own affairs she usually was not, because
no one cared to listen to her; but to-day she became so, and her
confidante shed tears as she heard her speak, for she told of cruel,
slow-wasting, obstinate sufferings. Well might she be corpse-like; well
might she look grim, and never smile; well might she wish to avoid
excitement, to gain and retain composure! Caroline, when she knew all,
acknowledged that Miss Mann was rather to be admired for fortitude than
blamed for moroseness. Reade