Obedient to her elders' demands upon her to curb its riotousness, Constance had brushed smooth and capped her lustrous hair, yet its tendrils escaped upon her brow; it glinted below the cap around her ears, and in the back of her neck, and shone in the firelight like precious metal. Stephen Hopkins's eyes brightened with delight in her charm, but, though he was not one of the strictest of Plymouth colonists, yet was he too imbued with their customs to express his pleasure in Constance's beauty. Instead he said, but his voice thrilled with what he left unsaid: "It's a great thing, my girl, to draw such a woman as Portia, here in this leathern book. She shines through it, and you see her clever eyes, her splendid presence, best of all her great power to love, to humble herself, to forget herself for the man she hath chosen! I would have you conversant with the women here met, Constance; they are worthy friends for you, in the wilderness where such noble ladies are rare." "Yet we have fine women and devoted ones here, Father," objected Constance, putting down the fine linen that she was hemstitching for her father's wearing. He noted the slender, supple hands, long-fingered, graceful, yet a womanly hand, made for loyalty. "Far be it from me to belittle them who recognized their hard and repulsive duty in the plague last winter, and performed it with utter self-renunciation," said Stephen Hopkins. "But, Constance, there is a something that, while it cannot transcend goodness, enhances it and places its possessor on a sort of dais all her life. Your mother had it, child. She was beautiful, charming, winsome, gracious, yet had she a lordly way with her; you see it in a fine-bred steed; I know not how to describe it. She was mettlesome, spirited. It was as if she did the right with a sort of inborn scorn for aught low; had made her choice at birth for true nobility and could but abide by it for aye, having made that choice. You have much of her, my lass, and I am daily thankful for it. A fine lady, was your exquisite young mother, and that says it, though the term is lowered by common usage. I would that you could have known her, my poor child! It was a loss hard to accept that you were deprived of her too soon, and never could have her direct impress upon you. And yet, thank Heaven, she hath left it upon you in mothering you, though the memory of her doth not bless you. And you sit here, upon a Plymouth hearthstone, far from the civilization that produced her, and to this I brought you!"