from pronouncing her to be masculine; the face took from the figure the
charm of feminacy. It was the head of the young Augustus upon the form
of Agrippina. One touch more, and we close a description which already
perhaps the reader may consider frivolously minute. If you had placed
before the mouth and lower part of the face a mask or bandage, the whole
character of the upper face would have changed at once,--the eye lost its
glittering falseness, the brow its sinister contraction; you would have
pronounced the face not only beautiful, but sweet and womanly. Take that
bandage suddenly away and the change would have startled you, and
startled you the more because you could detect no sufficient defect or
disproportion in the lower part of the countenance to explain it. It was
as if the mouth was the key to the whole: the key nothing without the
text, the text uncomprehended without the key.

Such, then, was Lucretia Clavering in outward appearance at the age of
twenty,--striking to the most careless eye; interesting and perplexing
the student in that dark language never yet deciphered,--the human
countenance. The reader must have observed that the effect every face
that he remarks for the first time produces is different from the
impression it leaves upon him when habitually seen. Perhaps no two
persons differ more from each other than does the same countenance in our
earliest recollection of it from the countenance regarded in the
familiarity of repeated intercourse. And this was especially the case
with Lucretia Clavering's: the first impulse of nearly all who beheld it
was distrust that partook of fear; it almost inspired you with a sense of
danger. The judgment rose up against it; the heart set itself on its
guard. But this uneasy sentiment soon died away, with most observers, in
admiration at the chiselled outline, which, like the Grecian sculpture,
gained the more the more it was examined, in respect for the intellectual
power of the expression, and in fascinated pleasure at the charm of a