old age, had been almost unable to leave his arm-chair, she had refused
to leave him for a single moment; and, since she could not always be
reading and working her mind, she had felt the necessity of taking
up some of those feminine occupations which, as she said, "are the
amusements of captivity." She had conquered her nature then in truly
heroic fashion. In one of those secret struggles which often take place
under our eyes without our suspecting the issue involved, she had done
more than subdue her nature, she had even changed the circulation of
her blood. I found her thinner; and her complexion had lost that first
freshness of youth which, like the bloom that the breath of morning
spreads over fruit, disappears at the slightest shock from without,
although it may have been respected by the heat of the sun. Yet in this
premature paleness and in this somewhat unhealthy thinness there seemed
to be an indefinable charm; her eyes, more sunken, but inscrutable as
ever, showed less pride and more melancholy than of old; her mouth
had become more mobile, and her smile was more delicate and less
contemptuous. When she spoke to me, I seemed to behold two persons in
her, the old and the new; and I found that, so far from having lost her
beauty, she had attained ideal perfection. Still, I remember several
persons at that time used to declare that she had "changed very much,"
which with them meant that she had greatly deteriorated. Beauty,
however, is like a temple in which the profane see naught but the
external magnificence. The divine mystery of the artist's thought
reveals itself only to profound sympathy, and the inspiration in each
detail of the sublime work remains unseen by the eyes of the vulgar. One
of your modern authors, I fancy, has said this in other words and much
better. As for myself, at no moment in her life did I find Edmee less
beautiful than at any other. Even in the hours of suffering, when beauty
in its material sense seems obliterated, hers but assumed a divine
form in my eyes, and in her face I beheld the splendour of a new moral