a youthful expression of face, owing perhaps to a pair of very vivacious black eyes. She was dressed, after a somewhat slatternly fashion, in a wrapper of crimson merino much the worse for wear, a blue handkerchief twisted turban-like round her head, and her feet encased in list slippers. The person to whom she addressed herself was a young lady with dark hair, which, despite its evident repugnance, was restrained into smooth glossy braids over the forehead, and at the crown of the small graceful head into the simple knot which Horace has described as “Spartan.” Her dress contrasted the speaker’s by an exquisite neatness.
We have seen her before as the lady in the pearl-coloured robe; but seen now at home she looks much younger. She was one of those whom, encountered in the streets or in society, one might guess to be married,—probably a young bride; for thus seen there was about her an air of dignity and of self-possession which suits well with the ideal of chaste youthful matronage; and in the expression of the face there was a pensive thoughtfulness beyond her years. But as she now sat by the open window arranging flowers in a glass bowl, a book lying open on her lap, you would never have said, “What a handsome woman!” you would have said, “What a charming girl!” All about her was maidenly, innocent, and fresh. The dignity of her bearing was lost in household ease, the pensiveness of her expression in an untroubled serene sweetness.
Perhaps many of my readers may have known friends engaged in some absorbing cause of thought, and who are in the habit when they go out, especially if on solitary walks, to take that cause of thought with them. The friend may be an orator meditating his speech, a poet his verses, a lawyer a difficult case, a physician an intricate malady. If you have such a friend, and you observe him thus away from his home, his face will seem to you older and graver. He is absorbed in the care that weighs on him. When you see him in a holiday moment at his own fireside, the care is thrown aside; perhaps he mastered while abroad the difficulty that had troubled him; he is cheerful, pleasant, sunny. This appears to be very much the case with persons of genius. When in their own houses we usually find them very playful and childlike. Most persons of real genius, whatever they may seem out of doors, are very sweet-tempered at home, and sweet temper is sympathizing and genial in the intercourse of private life. Certainly, observing this girl as she now bends over the flowers, it would be difficult to believe her to be the Isaura Cicogna whose letters to Madame de Grantinesnil exhibit the doubts and struggles of an unquiet, discontented, aspiring mind. Only in one or two passages in those letters would you have guessed at the writer in the girl as we now see her. It is in those passages where she expresses her love of harmony, and her repugnance to contest: those were characteristics you might have read in her face.
Certainly the girl is very lovely: what long dark eyelashes! what soft, tender, dark-blue eyes! now that she looks up and smiles, what a bewitching smile it is! by what sudden play of rippling dimples the smile is enlivened and redoubled! Do you notice one feature? In very showy beauties it is seldom noticed; but I, being in my way a physiognomist, consider that it is always worth heeding as an index of character. It is the ear. Remark how delicately it is formed in her: none of that heaviness of lobe which is a sure sign of sluggish intellect and coarse perception. Hers is the artist’s ear. Note next those hands: how beautifully shaped! small, but not doll-like hands,—ready and nimble, firm and nervous hands, that could work for a helpmate. By no means very white, still less red, but somewhat embrowned as by the sun, such as you may see in girls reared in southern climes, and in her perhaps betokening an impulsive character which had not accustomed itself, when at sport in the open air, to the thraldom of gloves,—very impulsive people even in cold climates seldom do.
In conveying to us by a few bold strokes an idea of the sensitive, quick-moved, warm-blooded Henry II., the most impulsive of the Plantagenets, his contemporary chronicler tells us that rather than imprison those active hands of his, even in hawking-gloves, he would suffer his falcon to fix its sharp claws into his wrist. No doubt there is a difference as to what is befitting between a burly bellicose creature like Henry II. and a delicate young lady like Isaura Cicogna; and one would not wish to see those dainty wrists of hers seamed and scarred by a falcon’s claws. But a girl may not be less exquisitely feminine for slight heed of artificial prettiness. Isaura had no need of pale bloodless hands to seem one of Nature’s highest grade of gentlewomen even to the most fastidious eyes. About her there was a charm apart from her mere beauty, and often disturbed instead of heightened by her mere intellect: it consisted in a combination of exquisite artistic refinement, and of a generosity of character by which refinement was animated into vigour and warmth.
The room, which was devoted exclusively to Isaura, had in it much that spoke of the occupant. That room, when first taken furnished, had a good deal of the comfortless showiness which belongs to ordinary furnished apartments in France, especially in the Parisian suburbs, chiefly let for the summer: thin limp muslin curtains that decline to draw; stiff mahogany chairs covered with yellow Utrecht velvet; a tall secretaire in a dark corner; an oval buhl-table set in tawdry ormolu, islanded in the centre of a poor but gaudy Scotch carpet; and but one other table of dull walnut-wood, standing clothless before a sofa to match the chairs; the eternal ormolu clock flanked by the two eternal ormolu candelabra on the dreary mantelpiece. Some of this garniture had been removed, others softened into cheeriness and comfort. The room somehow or other—thanks partly to a very moderate expenditure in pretty twills with pretty borders, gracefully simple table-covers, with one or two additional small tables and easy-chairs, two simple vases filled with flowers; thanks still more to a nameless skill in re-arrangement, and the disposal of the slight knick-knacks and well-bound volumes, which, even in travelling, women who have cultivated the pleasures of taste carry about them—had been coaxed into that quiet harmony, that tone of consistent subdued colour, which corresponded with the characteristics of the inmate. Most people might have been puzzled where to place the piano, a semi-grand, so as not to take up too much space in the little room; but where it was placed it seemed so at home that you might have supposed the room had been built for it.
There are two kinds of neatness,—one is too evident, and makes everything about it seem trite and cold and stiff; and another kind of neatness disappears from our sight in a satisfied sense of completeness,—like some exquisite, simple, finished style of writing, an Addison’s or a St. Pierre’s.
This last sort of neatness belonged to Isaura, and brought to mind the well-known line of Catullus when on recrossing his threshold he invokes its welcome,—a line thus not inelegantly translated by Leigh Hunt,
“Smile every dimple on the cheek of Home.”
I entreat the reader’s pardon for this long descriptive digression; but Isaura is one of those characters which are called many-sided, and therefore not very easy to comprehend. She gives us one side of her character in her correspondence with Madame de Grantmesnil, and another side of it in her own home with her Italian companion,—half nurse, half chaperon.
“Monsieur Louvier is indeed very courteous,” said Isaura, looking up from the flowers with the dimpled smile we have noticed. “But I think, Madre, that we should do well to stay at home on Saturday,—not peacefully, for I owe you your revenge at Euchre.”
“You can’t mean it, Piecola!” exclaimed the Signora, in evident consternation. “Stay at home!—why stay at home? Euchre is very well when there is nothing else to do: but change is pleasant; le bon Dieu likes it,
“‘Ne caldo ne gelo
Resta mai in cielo.’
“And such beautiful ices one gets at M. Louvier’s! Did you taste the pistachio ice? What fine rooms, and so well lit up! I adore light. And the ladies so beautifully dressed: one sees the fashions. Stay at home! play at Euchre indeed! Piccola, you cannot be so cruel to yourself: you are young.”
“But, dear Madre, just consider; we are invited because we are considered professional singers: your reputation as such is of course established,—mine
