eyes and to prompt her complicated gestures. Those features in
especial had a misleading eloquence; they lingered on you with a far-
off dimness, an air of obstructed sympathy, which was certainly not
always a key to the spirit of their owner; so that, of a truth, a
young lady could scarce have been so dejected and disillusioned
without having committed a crime for which she was consumed with
remorse, or having parted with a hope that she couldn't sanely have
entertained. She had, I believe, the usual allowance of rather vain
motives: she wished to be looked at, she wished to be married, she
wished to be thought original.

It costs me a pang to speak in this irreverent manner of one of
Ambient's name, but I shall have still less gracious things to say
before I've finished my anecdote, and moreover--I confess it--I owe
the young lady a bit of a grudge. Putting aside the curious cast of
her face she had no natural aptitude for an artistic development, had
little real intelligence. But her affectations rubbed off on her
brother's renown, and as there were plenty of people who darkly
disapproved of him they could easily point to his sister as a person
formed by his influence. It was quite possible to regard her as a
warning, and she had almost compromised him with the world at large.
He was the original and she the inevitable imitation. I suppose him
scarce aware of the impression she mainly produced, beyond having a
general idea that she made up very well as a Rossetti; he was used to
her and was sorry for her, wishing she would marry and observing how
she didn't. Doubtless I take her too seriously, for she did me no
harm, though I'm bound to allow that I can only half-account for her.
She wasn't so mystical as she looked, but was a strange indirect
uncomfortable embarrassing woman. My story gives the reader at best
so very small a knot to untie that I needn't hope to excite his