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. Meldrum'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 had no objection to the bringing of
such a face close to mine. However, by the time the young lady moved on
with her escort she herself bequeathed me a sense that some such
_rapprochement_ might still occur. Was this by reason of the general
frequency of encounters at Folkestone, or by reason of a subtle
acknowledgment that she contrived to make of the rights, on the part of
others, that such beauty as hers created? I was in a position to answer