I have often wished I had been born an artist, that I might try to paint your portrait, for words can no more picture you than they can transmit the fragrance of a violet. Indeed, to me the only word which even expresses your charm is “radiant,” and that to others, who have never seen you, would suggest little. No real beauty can be described, for it rests in nothing that is tangible. In truth, to speak of your glorious hair, the whiteness of your brow and throat, the brilliant softness of your eyes, or the sweetness yet strength of your tender though unsmiling lips is to make but a travesty of description. I have heard painters talk of your hair and try to convey an idea of its beauty, but I know it too well even to make the attempt. When we were gazing at the rainbow, last autumn, and you said that if its tints could be transferred to a palette you believed it would be possible to paint anything, I could not help correcting, “Except your hair.” You laughed, and declared, “I did not know you ever made that kind of a speech!” whereupon Agnes cried, “Didn’t I ever tell you, Maizie, the compliment the doctor paid you last winter?” I thought she was alluding to my retort when my mother asserted that your eyes were so large and lustrous that, to her, they were “positively loud.” Indignant at such a remark, Agnes had appealed to me to deny it. Not caring to treat the malicious speech seriously, I had answered that I could not agree, though I had sometimes thought your eyes “too dressy for the daytime,”—a joke I have heard so often quoted that it is apparently in a measure descriptive, yet one which I should have felt mortified at hearing repeated to you. Fortunately Agnes’s reference was to another remark of mine, in which, speaking of your mouth, I had crudely translated a couple of lines from a Persian poem:— “In vain you strive to speak a bitter word— It meets the sweetness of your lips ere it is heard.”