with an easy, pliant firmness; her waist, perfection in the eyes
of a man, for it occupied its natural place, it filled out its
natural circle, it was visibly and delightfully undeformed by
stays. She had not heard my entrance into the room; and I allowed
myself the luxury of admiring her for a few moments, before I
moved one of the chairs near me, as the least embarrassing means
of attracting her attention. She turned towards me immediately.
The easy elegance of every movement of her limbs and body as soon
as she began to advance from the far end of the room, set me in a
flutter of expectation to see her face clearly. She left the
window--and I said to myself, The lady is dark. She moved forward
a few steps--and I said to myself, The lady is young. She
approached nearer--and I said to myself (with a sense of surprise
which words fail me to express), The lady is ugly!

Never was the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more
flatly contradicted--never was the fair promise of a lovely figure
more strangely and startlingly belied by the face and head that
crowned it. The lady's complexion was almost swarthy, and the
dark down on her upper lip was almost a moustache. She had a
large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing,
resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually
low down on her forehead. Her expression--bright, frank, and
intelligent--appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether
wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and
pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive
is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on shoulders
that a sculptor would have longed to model--to be charmed by the
modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs
betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost