blue and white. A scarf of the same material sits crisply and
closely round her shoulders, and a little straw hat of the natural
colour, plainly and sparingly trimmed with ribbon to match the
gown, covers her head, and throws its soft pearly shadow over the
upper part of her face. Her hair is of so faint and pale a brown--
not flaxen, and yet almost as light; not golden, and yet almost
as glossy--that it nearly melts, here and there, into the shadow
of the hat. It is plainly parted and drawn back over her ears,
and the line of it ripples naturally as it crosses her forehead.
The eyebrows are rather darker than the hair; and the eyes are of
that soft, limpid, turquoise blue, so often sung by the poets, so
seldom seen in real life. Lovely eyes in colour, lovely eyes in
form--large and tender and quietly thoughtful--but beautiful above
all things in the clear truthfulness of look that dwells in their
inmost depths, and shines through all their changes of expression
with the light of a purer and a better world. The charm--most
gently and yet most distinctly expressed--which they shed over the
whole face, so covers and transforms its little natural human
blemishes elsewhere, that it is difficult to estimate the relative
merits and defects of the other features. It is hard to see that
the lower part of the face is too delicately refined away towards
the chin to be in full and fair proportion with the upper part;
that the nose, in escaping the aquiline bend (always hard and
cruel in a woman, no matter how abstractedly perfect it may be),
has erred a little in the other extreme, and has missed the ideal
straightness of line; and that the sweet, sensitive lips are
subject to a slight nervous contraction, when she smiles, which
draws them upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It
might be possible to note these blemishes in another woman's face
but it is not easy to dwell on them in hers, so subtly are they