MY DEAR TOM,—Come and spend a few days
with me at Cromwell Lodge, Moleswich. Mr. and
Mrs. Somers wish much to see and to thank you.
I could not remain forever degraded in order to gratify
your whim. They would have it that I bought
their shop, etc., and I was forced in self-defence
to say who it was. More on this and on travels
when you come.
Your true friend,
K.
C.
MRS. CAMERON was seated alone in her pretty drawing-room,
with a book lying open, but unheeded, on her lap.
She was looking away from its pages, seemingly into
the garden without, but rather into empty space.
To a very acute and practised observer, there was
in her countenance an expression which baffled the
common eye.
To the common eye it was simply vacant; the expression
of a quiet, humdrum woman, who might have been thinking
of some quiet humdrum household detail,—found
that too much for her, and was now not thinking at
all.
But to the true observer, there were in that face
indications of a troubled past, still haunted with
ghosts never to be laid at rest,—indications,
too, of a character in herself that had undergone
some revolutionary change; it had not always been the
character of a woman quiet and humdrum. The
delicate outlines of the lip and nostril evinced sensibility,
and the deep and downward curve of it bespoke habitual
sadness. The softness of the look into space
did not tell of a vacant mind, but rather of a mind
subdued and over-burdened by the weight of a secret
sorrow. There was also about her whole presence,
in the very quiet which made her prevalent external
characteristic, the evidence of manners formed in
a high-bred society,—the society in which
quiet is connected with dignity and grace. The
poor understood this better than her rich acquaintances
at Moleswich, when they said, “Mrs. Cameron
was every inch a lady.” To judge by her
features she must once have been pretty, not a showy
prettiness, but decidedly pretty. Now, as the
features were small, all prettiness had faded away
in cold gray colourings, and a sort of tamed and slumbering
timidity of aspect. She was not only not demonstrative,
but must have imposed on herself as a duty the suppression
of demonstration. Who could look at the formation
of those lips, and not see that they belonged to the
nervous, quick, demonstrative temperament? And
yet, observing her again more closely, that suppression
of the constitutional tendency to candid betrayal
of emotion would the more enlist our curiosity or
interest; because, if physiognomy and phrenology have
any truth in them, there was little strength in her
character. In the womanly yieldingness of the
short curved upper lip, the pleading timidity of the
regard, the disproportionate but elegant slenderness
of the head between the ear and the neck, there were
the tokens of one who cannot resist the will, perhaps
the whim, of another whom she either loves or trusts.
