portrait over the drawing-room fireplace, in the frock she'd worn when
she had dined "with her family in France--" Mademoiselle had dressed
Octavia for that wonderful party and she had never tired of telling
Felicia how beautiful the eighteen-year Octavia had been.

"It is a woman's duty to think of her charms," Mademoiselle had said,
"that is what the husband of Julie, Madame Recamier, said, it is what
Madame Louise taught Miss Octavia--"

And so Felicia naively parted her hair and brushed it satin-smooth and
coiled it neatly on the nape of her white neck with the same big
carved coral Spanish comb tucked into the shining mass that Octavia
had worn when she sat for the portrait. Sometimes she wore the lovely
black lace shawl, sometimes the creamy white embroidered silk one, and
always the delicate coral and silver jewelry. Yet she couldn't
possibly have known from the pale image that stared back at her from
the dim shimmer of the drawing-room mirrors, how exquisitely lovely
she was, not even when the Major bent over her hand and said, as he
had said so often to her mother,

"You are very charming today, my dear!"

He did not know himself, the grim old stoic, how much he adored her.

At length there came a certain spring, seductive, too early warm, when
the Major grew thoughtful, when Certain Legal Matters came frequently
in the evening and left Felicia to ponder over her embroidery frame or
wander restlessly in the bit of garden. She was seventeen now, a
glowing, radiant seventeen, so divinely happy that the Major smiled
whenever he looked at her.