Now Mistress Carmen was a bit of a painter, in a pretty little way, with
all the vague longings of an artist, but without, I fear, the artist's
steadfast soul. She recognized beauty and form as a child might, without
understanding their meaning, and somehow failed to make them even
interpret her woman's moods, which surely were nature's too. So she
painted everything with this innocent lust of the eye,--flowers, birds,
insects, landscapes, and figures,--with a joyous fidelity, but no
particular poetry. The bird never sang to her but one song, the flowers
or trees spake but one language, and her skies never brightened except
in color. She came out strong on the Catholic saints, and would toss
you up a cleanly-shaven Aloysius, sweetly destitute of expression, or
a dropsical, lethargic Madonna that you couldn't have told from an old
master, so bad it was. Her faculty of faithful reproduction even showed
itself in fanciful lettering,--and latterly in the imitation of fabrics
and signatures. Indeed, with her eye for beauty of form, she had always
excelled in penmanship at the Convent,--an accomplishment which the good
sisters held in great repute.

In person she was petite, with a still unformed girlish figure, perhaps
a little too flat across the back, and with possibly a too great
tendency to a boyish stride in walking. Her brow, covered by blue-black
hair, was low and frank and honest; her eyes, a very dark hazel, were
not particularly large, but rather heavily freighted in their melancholy
lids with sleeping passion; her nose was of that unimportant character
which no man remembers; her mouth was small and straight; her teeth,
white and regular. The whole expression of her face was piquancy that
might be subdued by tenderness or made malevolent by anger. At present
it was a salad in which the oil and vinegar were deftly combined.
The astute feminine reader will of course understand that this is the
ordinary superficial masculine criticism, and at once make up her mind