This fair lady's advent was a sensation--to me a sensation that never palled or wore itself away; it was no longer now "la belle Madame Pasquier," but "la divine Madame Seraskier"--beauty-blind as the French are apt to be. She topped my tall mother by more than half a head; as was remarked by Madame Pele, whose similes were all of the kitchen and dining-room, "elle lui mangerait des petits pates sur la tete!" And height, that lends dignity to ugliness, magnifies beauty on a scale of geometrical progression--2, 4, 8, 16, 32--for every consecutive inch, between five feet five, let us say, and five feet ten or eleven (or thereabouts), which I take to have been Madame Seraskier's measurement. She had black hair and blue eyes--of the kind that turns violet in a novel--and a beautiful white skin, lovely hands and feet, a perfect figure, and features chiselled and finished and polished and turned out with such singular felicitousness that one gazed and gazed till the heart was full of a strange jealous resentment at any one else having the right to gaze on something so rare, so divinely, so sacredly fair--any one in the world but one's self! But a woman can be all this without being Madame Seraskier--she was much more. For the warmth and genial kindness of her nature shone through her eyes and rang in her voice. All was of a piece with her--her simplicity, her grace, her naturalness and absence of vanity; her courtesy, her sympathy, her mirthfulness. I do not know which was the most irresistible: she had a slight Irish accent when she spoke English, a less slight English accent when she spoke French! I made it my business to acquire both. Indeed, she was in heart and mind and body what we should _all_ be but for the lack of a little public spirit and self-denial (under proper guidance) during the last few hundred years on the part of a few thousand millions of our improvident fellow-creatures. There should be no available ugly frames for beautiful souls to be hurried into by carelessness or mistake, and no ugly souls should be suffered to creep, like hermit-crabs, into beautiful shells never intended for them. The outward and visible form should mark the inward and spiritual grace; that it seldom does so is a fact there is no gainsaying. Alas! such beauty is such an exception that its possessor, like a prince of the blood royal, is pampered and spoiled from the very cradle, and every good and generous and unselfish impulse is corroded by adulation--that spontaneous tribute so lightly won, so quickly paid, and accepted so royally as a due. So that only when by Heaven's grace the very beautiful are also very good, is it time for us to go down on our knees, and say our prayers in thankfulness and adoration; for the divine has been permitted to make itself manifest for a while in the perishable likeness of our poor humanity.