Several friends of Mrs. Northrup joined her, and Van Zandt excused himself and went to make one of the little group of men around Miss Solander, followed by a parting injunction from his sister to remember that benzine would remove paint spots if applied while they were fresh. Beautiful as this flower-faced girl was at all times, by lamp light and in evening dress she was lovely beyond all power of words to express, and as I came to know her I found that her beauty was not alone in her superb coloring, in the perfect lines of her face and figure or in her exuberant health, but was in her life; for she was--and is--that rare, sweet thing, a womanly woman, brave, strong, gentle, generous, pure of heart and clean of thought, a lover of truth, a hater of meanness, with a mind broadened by travel and burnished by attrition; and she carried, moreover, a cloak of charity of such wide and ample fold that it fell lovingly over even the follies and frailties of those weaker ones of her own sex and was proof against the arrows of envy. With old people and children she was a great favorite; the men were her enthusiastic admirers, and a good half dozen of them were helplessly, hopelessly, over head and ears in love with her; but a number of the young married women and girls professed strong disapproval of her, on similar grounds to those outlined by Mrs. Northrup on the steamer, though I had my private suspicions that, in some cases at least, they were a trifle jealous of the attention she received from the men, who, as is generally the case at summer resorts, were not overabundant. Mrs. Northrup's dislike was an honest one, for she firmly believed the girl was artificial, and having carefully avoided an intimacy knew but little of the lovely nature and bright mind that no one was better fitted to appreciated than she. Besides, Madame Nell was a born matchmaker and wanted her adored brother to marry her particular friend and crony, Miss Carrie Belmont, a brighteyed, keen-witted, merry little soul, who took nothing seriously except medicine and had about as much fixedness of purpose as a month-old kitten. To a man like Van Zandt, who needed both the curb and spur of a mentality as strong and earnest as his own, she would have been about as valuable a helpmeet as was poor little Dora to David Copperfield. But Nell was fond of the pretty, clever little creature, felt sure (as our mothers and sisters, God bless 'em! always do) that her brother was thoroughly incapable of picking out the right kind of a wife, and weeks before he came had perceived in Miss Solander's marvelous loveliness a dangerous and powerful factor in the personal equations she wished to make equal to each other, so that by the transposition of matrimony they should become one.