_embonpoint_, as widows of forty should be, with pretty fat
feet, and pretty fat hands; wearing just a _soupcon_ of a
widow's cap on her head, with her hair, now slightly grey, parted
in front, and brushed very smoothly, but not too carefully, in
_bandeaux_ over her forehead.

She was a quick little body, full of good-humour, slightly given
to repartee, and perhaps rather too impatient of a fool. But
though averse to a fool, she could sympathize with folly. A great
poet has said that women are all rakes at heart; and there was
something of the rake at heart about Mrs. Woodward. She never
could be got to express adequate horror at fast young men, and
was apt to have her own sly little joke at women who prided
themselves on being punctilious. She could, perhaps, the more
safely indulge in this, as scandal had never even whispered a
word against herself.

With her daughters she lived on terms almost of equality. The two
elder were now grown up; that is, they were respectively eighteen
and seventeen years old. They were devotedly attached to their
mother, looked on her as the only perfect woman in existence, and
would willingly do nothing that could vex her; but they perhaps
were not quite so systematically obedient to her as children
should be to their only surviving parent. Mrs. Woodward, however,
found nothing amiss, and no one else therefore could well have a
right to complain.

They were both pretty--but Gertrude, the elder, was by far the
more strikingly so. They were, nevertheless, much alike; they
both had rich brown hair, which they, like their mother, wore