She would do that at home, when someone was ill and she was under a strain. She would literally fade away before your eyes—but still just as cheerful and brave, laughing at the protests of the doctors, the outcries of her aunts and her colored “aunties.” At such times she had a quite new kind of beauty, that seemed to strike men dumb; she used to make merry over it, saying that she could go out when other women had to shut themselves behind curtains. For thinness brought out every line of her exquisitely chiseled features; every quiver of her soul seemed to show—her tense, swift being was as if cut there in living marble, and she was some unearthly creature, wraith-like, wonderful, thrilling. There were poets in Castleman County; they would meet her in this depleted state, and behave after the fashion of poets in semi-tropical climates—stand with their knees knocking and the perspiration oozing out upon their foreheads; they would wander off by moonlight-haunted streams and compose enraptured verses, and come back and fall upon their knees and implore her to accept the poor, feeble tribute of their adoration. I have seen her, too, when she was strong and happy, and then she would be well-made and shapely, with a charm of a more earthly sort. Then her color would be like the roses she always carried; and in each of her cheeks would appear the most adorable of dimples, and under her chin another. She had a nose that was very straight and finely carved; and right in the center, under the tip, the sculptor had put a tiny little groove. She had also a chin that was very straight, and right in the center of this was a corresponding little groove. You will laugh perhaps; but those touches added marvelously to the expressiveness of her countenance. How they would shift and change when, for instance, her nostrils quivered with anger, or when the imp of mischievousness took possession of her, and the network of quaint wrinkles gathered round her eyes! Dimples, I know, are an ultra-feminine property; but Sylvia’s face was not what is ordinarily called feminine—it was a kind of face that painters would give to a young boy singing in a church. I used to tell her that it was the kind they gave to angels of the higher orders; whereupon she would put her arms about me and whisper, “You old goose!” She had a pair of the strangest red-brown eyes, soft and tender; and then suddenly lighting up—shining, shining!