When Edith Grace saw Oscar Leigh, and arranged to go as companion to his mother, although she shrank naturally from his objectionable manner and unhappy appearance, she was better pleased than if he had belonged to the ordinary mould of man. His deformities made him seem a being proper to a new condition of life, a condition of life in which his very unusualness would enable her to preserve and even increase the feeling of reserve, and being apart from the world, cultivated by her with such success at Miss Graham's and at home. He was so much out of the common, he need not be taken into account at all. His unhandsome appearance would be no more to her than the unhandsomeness of this street in which she, who dreamed of parks and palaces, and the Alhambra of Granada, lived. No doubt to look at him was to feel unpleasant, but the endurance of unpleasant sights was not very much harder, if so hard, as doing without pleasing sights, and she had taught herself to abstain from longing after gratifying the eyes. The system of self-denial which she had imposed upon herself with so much success needed only a little extension to cover endurance of the undesirable. She was strong, fortified at every point. This system of hers was the whole secret of getting through life scatheless. It afforded an armour nothing could pierce. It made her superior to fate--absolutely superior to fate. She had built for herself a tower of strength. She lived in a virgin fortress. In thinking over at Miss Graham's the possible suitors a young lady who lodged in Grimsby Street might have, she had allowed as likely a City clerk, or a prosperous hairdresser, or a man who contracted for the supply of suppers, or a man who beat carpets, or a baker in a white cap, or the son and heir of a tailor. With such, she had some kind of acquaintance, either personal or by strong hearsay. Often in amused reverie, she passed these candidates for the hand of an imaginary young lady before her view. The young men were invariably in their Sunday best when they came a-wooing. There was a dandified air, an air of coxcombry, about them which amused her. They were, of course, dandies only after their kind; not like Lord Byron in his Childe Harold days, or the dandy officers for whom the great Duke of Wellington prayed so devoutly. They wore gloves of a sort, and flowers in their button-holes. They carried canes in genteel imitation of the beaux of old. Their hair was arranged with much precision and nicety. Their figures were good. They were stalwart and valorous, not, indeed, in the grand way, but as of their kind. They made displays, as displays may be made in reasonable conduct, of their physical graces and alertness. They carried themselves with the heroic air, without the inartistic stiffness of soldiers of the rank and file. Their features were well proportioned and agreeable, and they wore smiles of bland confidence and alluring archness. They looked their approbation