E nel muover degli occhi onesta e tarda:
they seemed too large to move otherwise than with a slow turning like
that of the heavens. At first they looked black, but if one ventured
inquiry, which was as dangerous as to gaze from the battlements of
Elsinore, he found them a not very dark brown. In her face, however,
especially when flushed, they had all the effect of what Milton
describes as
Quel sereno fulgor d'amabil nero.
A wise observer would have been a little troubled in regarding her
mouth. The sadness of a morbid sensibility hovered about it--the sign
of an imagination wrought upon from the centre of self. Her lips were
neither thin nor compressed--they closed lightly, and were richly
curved; but there was a mobility almost tremulous about the upper lip
that gave sign of the possibility of such an oscillation of feeling as
might cause the whole fabric of her nature to rock dangerously.
The moment her father re-entered, she started from her stool on the rug,
and proceeded to make the tea. Her father took no notice of her neglect,
but drew a chair to the table, helped himself to a piece of oat-cake,
hastily loaded it with as much butter as it could well carry, and while
eating it forgot it and everything else in the absorption of a volume he
had brought in with him from his study, in which he was tracing out some
genealogical thread of which he fancied he had got a hold. Mysie was
very active now, and lost the expression of far-off-ness which had
hitherto characterized her countenance; till, having poured out the tea,
she too plunged at once into her novel, and, like her father, forgot
everything and everybody near her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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