She was a goodly picture of girlhood, Diana not so likely to be enamoured of Endymion as sandalled for the chase. Not tall, yet long-legged enough to give her advantage on the road or the English downs, she had a free grace of movement, untrammeled by the awkwardness of fear. Even so early, she was slightly deaf, and one of her prettiest individual poses—yet how unstudied!—was, standing, bent slightly forward like Atalanta ready for the race, the rounded cup of her palm behind her ear, beseeching almost whimsically in the low voice that was half whisper without its sibilance: “Please!” Her misfortune was not a blemish; she made it a grace. Over that and the drawback of eyes ineffectual without the help of glasses she never wasted a breath of impatience: she adopted instead a humorous acceptance of these latter extraneous servitors as personified faculties of her own. The act of vision she ascribed to her spectacles alone, and took a never diminished joy in reminding you how Thackeray did it before her. “If one dastard of a misplaced comma has escaped me,” she writes, of printers’ proofs corrected to the last degree of accuracy, “these spectacles fail to find it.” Upon one victorious error, chased down and down and still cropping up in the last proof, she declares: “Tragedy! how could it have come about? I’d give my spectacles to know.” Probably nobody so unspoiled and humble in willingness to share the common lot, or with less respect for the subterfuge called temperament, ever had less practical acquaintance with the domestic functions exalted into dull shibboleths, or was more irreconcilably estranged from the art of the _modiste_ and the rites whereby the incomprehensible gods of “style” are commonly propitiated. If you could boil an egg acceptably and enliven it with an agreeable quota of salt and pepper, she would have made you _cordon bleu_ on the spot. That the sleeve of a garment could be removed by the simple adjunct of a pair of scissors and replaced again with a symmetry more conformable to the arm, was a mystery before which she frankly quailed, and any force of self-confidence she might have brought to bear went down like nine-pins. Running rivers of verse, pinnacles of dates, names, cosmogonies of thrones, principalities and powers, found room in that exquisitely ordered world which was her brain: yet you could throw her into a cold sweat of apprehension by confronting her with some homely task or implement as familiar to the Marthas of civil life as the use of fork and spoon. And this was no affectation of sensitiveness to crumpled rose leaves, no arrogance of privilege. She had an appetite as responsive to good things as if their chemistry had not been as dark to her as that of lost elixirs, and for some inconspicuous ribbon of her dress she would cherish an affection almost poignant in its childlike intensity. She was herself alternately petrified and convulsed by