the resemblance, as it were, so that at nineteen, although her slender
figure, and air, and carriage continually recalled Mrs. Orton Beg, who was
then in her thirty-fifth year, the expression of her face was so different
that they were really less alike than they had been when Evadne was four
years younger. Evadne's disposition, it must be remembered, was
essentially swift to act. She would, as a human being, have her periods of
strong feeling, but that was merely a physical condition in no way
affecting her character; and the only healthy minded happy state for her
was the one in which thought instantly translated itself into action.

With Mrs. Orton Beg it was different. Her spiritual nature predominated,
her habits of mind were dreamy. She lived for the life to come entirely,
and held herself in constant communion with another world. She felt it
near her, she said. She believed that its inhabitants visit the earth, and
take cognizance of all we do and suffer; and she cherished the certainty
of one day assuming a wondrous form, and entering upon a new life, as
vivid and varied and as real as this, but far more perfect. Her friends
were chiefly of her own way of thinking; but her faith was so profound,
and the charm of her conversation so entrancing, that the hardest headed
materialists were apt to feel strange delicious thrills in her presence,
forebodings of possibilities beyond the test of reason and knowledge; and
they would return time after time to dispute her conclusions and argue
themselves out of the impression she had produced, but only to relapse
into their former state of blissful sensation so soon as they once more
found themselves within range of her influence. Opinions are germs in the
moral atmosphere which fasten themselves upon us if we are predisposed to
entertain them; but some states of feeling are a perfume which every
sentient being must perceive with emotions that vary from extreme
repugnance to positive pleasure through diverse intermediate strata of
lively interest or mere passive perception; and the feeling which emanated