"'Why not? Indeed, how could I disbelieve you after your lecture?'

"'It is well,' said Jacintha, with dignity.

"She was twenty-seven by the parish-books."

There is a good deal of picturesque beauty in this volume, and at the
opening of its affairs there occurs a paragraph which we appropriate,
not merely for its merit, nor because it is the only "interior" that we
can recall in all his novels, but because also it contains a
characteristically fearless measuring of swords with a great champion:--

"A spacious saloon panelled: dead, but snowy white picked out
sparingly with gold. Festoons of fruit and flowers finely carved
in wood on some of the panels. These also not smothered with
gilding, but as it were gold speckled here and there like tongues
of flame winding among insoluble snows.... Midway from the candle
to the distant door its twilight deepened, and all became
shapeless and sombre. The prospect ended half-way, sharp and
black, as in those out-o'-door closets imagined and painted by Mr.
Turner, whose Nature (Mr. Turner's) comes to a full stop as soon
as Mr. Turner sees no further occasion for her, instead of melting
by fine expanse and exquisite gradation into genuine distance, as
Nature does in Claude and in Nature. To reverse the picture:
standing at the door, you looked across forty feet of black, and
the little corner seemed on fire, and the fair heads about the
candle shone like the heads of St. Cecilias and Madonnas in an
antique stained-glass window. At last Laure [Laure Aglaë Rose de
Beaurepaire,--would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?]