persuasive speakers in a good cause, and that rhetoric is to be suspected
as the flourish over a weak one. Does it soften the obdurate, kindle the
tardily inflammable? Only for a day, and only in cases of extreme
urgency, is an appeal to emotion of value for the gain of a day. Thus it
was that she never forced her voice, though her feelings might be at heat
and she possessed the literary art.

She writes from her home on the Upper Nile: 'In this country one gets to
see how much more beautiful a perfectly natural expression is than any
degree of the mystical expression of the best painters.' It is by her
banishing of literary colouring matter that she brings the Arab and Copt
home to us as none other has done, by her unlaboured pleading that she
touches to the heart. She was not one to 'spread gold-leaf over her
acquaintances and make them shine,' as Horace Walpole says of Madame de
Sevigne; they would have been set shining from within, perhaps with a
mild lustre; sensibly to the observant, more credibly of the golden sort.
Her dislike of superlatives, when the marked effect had to be produced,
and it was not the literary performance she could relish as well as any
of us, renders hard the task of portraying a woman whose character calls
them forth. To him knowing her, they would not fit; her individuality
passes between epithets. The reading of a sentence of panegyric
(commonly a thing of extension) deadened her countenance, if it failed to
quicken the corners of her lips; the distended truth in it exhibited the
comic shadow on the wall behind. That haunting demon of human eulogy is
quashed by the manner she adopted, from instinct and training. Of her it
was known to all intimate with her that she could not speak falsely in
praise, nor unkindly in depreciation, however much the constant play of
her humour might tempt her to exalt or diminish beyond the bounds. But
when, for the dispersion of nonsense about men or things, and daintiness
held up the veil against rational eyesight, the _gros mot_ was demanded,