tone with the scene. She was a symphony in gold--nothing less. Her
hair, her cheeks, her eyes, her skin, her laugh, her voice they were all
gold. Everything about her was so demonstratively golden that you might
have had a suspicion it was made and not born; as though it was unreal,
and the girl herself a proper subject of suspicion. The eyelashes were
so long and so black, the eyes were so topaz, the hair was so like such a
cloud of gold as would be found on Joan of Are as seen by a mediaeval
painter, that an air of faint artificiality surrounded what was in every
other way a remarkable effort of nature to give this region, where she
was so very busy, a keynote.

Poseurs have said that nature is garish or exaggerated more often than
not; but it is a libel. She is aristocratic to the nth degree, and is
never over done; courage she has, but no ostentation. There was,
however, just a slight touch of over-emphasis in this singing-girl's
presentation--that you were bound to say, if you considered her quite
apart from her place in this nature-scheme. She was not wholly
aristocratic; she was lacking in that high, social refinement which would
have made her gold not so golden, her black eyelashes not so black.
Being unaristocratic is not always a matter of birth, though it may be a
matter of parentage.

Her parentage was honest and respectable and not exalted. Her father had
been an engineer, who had lost his life on a new railway of the West.
His widow had received a pension from the company insufficient to
maintain her, and so she kept boarders, the coat of one of whom her
daughter was now brushing as she sang. The widow herself was the origin
of the girl's slight disqualification for being of that higher circle of
selection which nature arranges long before society makes its judicial
decision. The father had been a man of high intelligence, which his