She didn’t fly out at him exactly; but she retorted succinctly, with a peremptory gesture, “No, it’s not going to rain,” as who should say, “It daren’t.” And she drove in her victoria, and spoiled her sweet new frock. “Not to speak of my sweet new top-hat,” sighs Florimond, who attended her; “the only Lincoln and Bennett topper in the whole length and breadth of Monterosso.” She is hasty, she is uncertain; and then... she is intense. She talks in italics, she feels in superlatives; she admits no comparative degree, no emotional half-tones. When she is not ecstatically happy, she is desperately miserable; wonders why she was ever born into this worst of all possible worlds; wishes she were dead; and even sometimes drops dark hints of meditated suicide. When she is not in the brightest of affable humours, she is in the blackest of cross ones. She either loves a thing, or she simply can’t endure it;—the thing may be a town, a musical composition, a perfume, or a person. She either loves you, or simply can’t endure you; and she’s very apt to love you and to cease to love you alternately—or, at least, to give you to understand as much—three or four times a day. It is winter midnight or summer noon, a climate of extremes. “Do you like the smell of tangerine-skin?” Every evening for a week, when, at the end of dinner, the fruit was handed round, the King asked her that question; and she, never suspecting his malice, answered invariably, as she crushed a bit between her fingers, and fervidly inhaled its odour, “Oh, do I like it? I adore it. It’s perfect rapture.” She is hasty, she is uncertain, she is intense. Will you be surprised when I go on to insist that, down deep, she is altogether well-meaning and excessively tender-hearted, and when I own that among all the women I know I can think of none other who seems to me so attractive, so fascinating, so sweetly feminine and loveable? (Oh, no, I am not in love with her, not in the least—though I don’t say that I mightn’t be, if I were a king, or she were not a queen.) If she realises that she has been unreasonable, she is the first to confess it; she repents honestly, and makes the devoutest resolutions to amend. If she discovers that she has hurt anybody’s feelings, her conscience will not give her a single second of peace, until she has sought her victim out and heaped him with benefits. If she believes that this or that distasteful task forms in very truth a part of her duty, she will go to any length of persevering self-sacrifice to accomplish it.