Atlantic Coast (U.S.) -- Description and travel -- Fiction
self-possessed in manner, sensible-who made ready and incisive comments,
and seemed to have thought deeply on a large range of topics, but had
a sort of downright practicality and cool independence, with all
her femininity of bearing, that rather, puzzled her interlocutor. It
occurred to Mr. King to guess that Miss Selina Morton might be from
Boston, which she was not, but it was with a sort of shock of surprise
that he learned later that this young girl, moving about in society in
the innocent panoply of girlhood, was a young doctor, who had no doubt
looked through and through him with her keen eyes, studied him in the
light of heredity, constitutional tendencies, habits, and environment,
as a possible patient. It almost made him ill to think of it. Here were
types enough for one morning; but there was still another.
The artist had seated himself on a rock a little distance from the
house, and was trying to catch some of the figures as they appeared up
the path, and a young girl was looking over his shoulder with an amused
face, just as he was getting an elderly man in a long flowing duster,
straggling gray hair, hat on the back of his head, large iron-rimmed
spectacles, with a baggy umbrella, who stopped breathless at the summit,
with a wild glare of astonishment at the view. This young girl, whom the
careless observer might pass without a second glance, was discovered on
better acquaintance to express in her face and the lines of her figure
some subtle intellectual quality not easily interpreted. Marion Lamont,
let us say at once, was of Southern origin, born in London during the
temporary residence of her parents there, and while very young deprived
by death of her natural protectors. She had a small, low voice, fine
hair of a light color, which contrasted with dark eyes, waved back from
her forehead, delicate, sensitive features--indeed, her face, especially
in conversation with any one, almost always had a wistful, appealing
look; in figure short and very slight, lithe and graceful, full of
unconscious artistic poses, fearless and sure-footed as a gazelle in
climbing about the rocks, leaping from stone to stone, and even making
her way up a tree that had convenient branches, if the whim took her,
using her hands and arms like a gymnast, and performing whatever feat
of. daring or dexterity as if the exquisitely molded form was all
instinct with her indomitable will, and obeyed it, and always with an
air of refinement and spirited breeding. A child of nature in seeming,
but yet a woman who was not to be fathomed by a chance acquaintance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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