The lady stood over her, laughing gently, and when the child looked up at her, seemed much younger than she had at first, very young in spite of her white hair.  There was a soft red on her cheek; her lips looked full and triumphant with smiles; her eyes were like stars.  An emotion of her youth which had never become dulled by satisfaction had suddenly blossomed out on her face, and transformed it.  An unassuaged longing may serve to preserve youth as well as an undestroyed illusion; indeed, the two are one.  Cynthia Lennox looked at the child as if she had been a young mother, and she her first-born; triumph over the future, and daring for all odds, and perfect faith in the kingdom of joy were in her look.  Had she nursed one child like Ellen to womanhood, and tasted the bitter in the cup, she would not have been capable of that look, and would have been as old as her years.  She threw off her cloak and took off her bonnet, and the light struck her hair and made it look like silver.  A brooch in the laces at her throat shone with a thousand hues, and as Ellen gazed at it she felt curiously dull and dizzy.  She did not resist at all when the lady removed her little white shawl, but stared at her with the look of some small and helpless thing in too large a grasp of destiny to admit of a struggle.  “Oh, you darling!” Cynthia Lennox said, and stooped and kissed her, and half carried her into a great, warm, dazzling room, with light reflected in long lines of gold from picture-frames on the wall, and now and then startling patches of lurid color blazing forth unmeaningly from the dark incline of their canvases, with gleams of crystal and shadows of bronze in settings of fretted ebony, with long swayings of rich draperies at doors and windows, a red light of fire in a grate, and two white lights, one of piano keys, the other of a flying marble figure in a corner, outlined clearly against dusky red.  The light in this room was very dim.  It was all beyond Ellen’s imagination.  The White North where the Norway spruces lived would not have seemed as strange to her as this.  Neither would Bluebeard’s Castle, nor the House that Jack Built, nor the Palace of King Solomon, nor the tent in which lived little Joseph in his coat of many colors, nor even the Garden of Eden, nor Noah’s Ark.  Her imagination had not prepared her for a room like this.  She had formed her ideas of rooms upon her grandmother’s and her mother’s and the neighbors’ best parlors, with their glories of crushed plush and gilt and onyx and cheap lace and picture-throws and lambrequins.  This room was such a heterodoxy against her creed of civilization that it did not look beautiful to her as much as strange and bewildering, and when she was bidden to sit down in a little inlaid precious chair she put down her tiny hand and reflected, with a sense of strengthening of her household faith, that her grandmother had beautiful, smooth, shiny hair-cloth.