I soon felt that it was not the thing to be the only one who was
irreverently looking around, and my good-fortune soon supplied ample
motive for looking steadily in one direction. The reader may justly
think that I should have composed my mind to meditation on my many
sins, but I might as well have tried to gather in my hands the reins
of all the wild horses of Arabia as to curb and manage my errant
thoughts. My only chance was for some one or something to catch and
hold them for me. If that old Friend lady would preach I was sure she
would do me good. As it was, her face was an antidote to the
influences of the world in which I dwelt, but I soon began to dream
that I had found a still better remedy, for, at a fortunate angle from
my position, there sat a young Quakeress whose side face arrested my
attention and held it. By leaning a little against the wall as well as
the back of my bench, I also, well content, could look straight before
me like the others.

The fair profile was but slightly hidden by a hat that had a
perceptible leaning toward the world in its character, but the brow
was only made to seem a little lower, and her eyes deepened in their
blue by its shadow. My sweet-briar blossoms were not more delicate in
their pink shadings than was the bloom on her rounded cheek, and the
white, firm chin denoted an absence of weakness and frivolity. The
upper lip, from where I sat, seemed one half of Cupid's bow. I could
but barely catch a glimpse of a ripple of hair that, perhaps, had not
been smoothed with sufficient pains, and thus seemed in league with
the slightly worldly bonnet. In brief, to my kindled fancy, her youth
and loveliness appeared the exquisite human embodiment of the June
morning, with its alternations of sunshine and shadow, its roses and
their fragrance, of its abounding yet untarnished and beautiful life.