"She was utterly unscrupulous. The depth of her artifice was unfathomable. She soon became the moving spirit of that little cockney watering-place--some admiring her, some hating her, some desperately smitten with her. I can see through her manoeuvres now, but then I was blind as a mole. She understood every body about her, and held out to each the kind of bait which was most likely to attract him. There was a sort of _dilettante_ there whose heart she won by talking to him of the Italian poets, which, by the way, she really loved, for there was a dash of genius in her. She aimed to impress each one with the idea that in her heart she liked him better than any one else; and it was her game to appear on all occasions perfectly impulsive and spontaneous, while, in fact, every look, word, or act of hers had an object in it. In short, she was an accomplished actress; and, had her figure been more commanding, she might have rivalled Rachel on the stage. No two people were exactly agreed in opinion concerning her; but all--I mean all the men--thought her excessively interesting; and I remember that two young collegians had nearly fought a duel about her, each thinking that she was in love with him. Nothing delighted her more than to become the occasion of the jealousy of married women towards their husbands,--nothing, that is, except the still greater delight of fascinating a certain young New Yorker who had come to the house on a visit to his betrothed. "For some time every one supposed her to be unmarried. She did her best, indeed, to encourage the idea, since she thus gained to herself more notice and more marked attentions. At length, to the astonishment of every body, it came out that she had been, for more than a year, married to a cousin of her own, a weak and imbecile youngster, as I afterwards learned, who was then absent on an East India voyage, and who, happily for himself, has since died. "I said that all the men in the house were interested in her; but you should have seen the commotion she raised among the women! There were three or four simple girls about her who admired her, and were her devoted instruments; but with the rest she was at sword's point. There were a thousand ways in which they and she could come into collision; and, of course, they soon found her out, while the men remained in the dark. If they were handsome and attractive, she hated them; and if they would not conform to her will, she could never forgive it. The disputes, the jars, the jealousies, the backbitings, the tricks and stratagems of female warfare that I have seen in that house, and all of her raising! She was a dangerous enemy. Her tongue could sting like a wasp; and all the while she would smile on her victim as if she were reporting some agreeable compliment. She had a satanic dexterity in dealing out her stabs, always choosing the time, place, and company, where they would tell with the sharpest effect.