essence of all that was characteristic and delicious about her seemed to have run to her mouth; so that to kiss Grizel on her crooked smile would have been to kiss the whole of her at once.  She had a quaint way of nodding her head at you when she was talking.  It made you forget what she was saying, though it was really meant to have precisely the opposite effect.  Her voice was rich, with many inflections.  When she had much to say it gurgled like a stream in a hurry; but its cooing note was best worth remembering at the end of the day.  There were times when she looked like a boy.  Her almost gallant bearing, the poise of her head, her noble frankness—­they all had something in them of a princely boy who had never known fear.

I have no wish to hide her defects; I would rather linger over them, because they were part of Grizel, and I am sorry to see them go one by one.  Thrums had not taken her to its heart.  She was a proud-purse, they said, meaning that she had a haughty walk.  Her sense of justice was too great.  She scorned frailties that she should have pitied. (How strange to think that there was a time when pity was not the feeling that leaped to Grizel’s bosom first!) She did not care for study.  She learned French and the pianoforte to please the doctor; but she preferred to be sewing or dusting.  When she might have been reading, she was perhaps making for herself one of those costumes that annoyed every lady of Thrums who employed a dressmaker; or, more probably, it was a delicious garment for a baby; for as soon as Grizel heard that there was a new baby anywhere, all her intellect deserted her, and she became a slave.  Books often irritated her because she disagreed with the author; and it was a torment to her to find other people holding to their views when she was so certain that hers were right.  In church she sometimes rocked her arms; and the old doctor by her side knew that it was because she could not get up and contradict the minister.  She was, I presume, the only young lady who ever dared to say that she hated Sunday because there was so much sitting still in it.

Sitting still did not suit Grizel.  At all other times she was happy; but then her mind wandered back to the thoughts that had lived too closely with her in the old days, and she was troubled.  What woke her from these reveries was probably the doctor’s hand placed very tenderly on her shoulder, and then she would start, and wonder how long he had been watching her, and what were the grave thoughts behind his cheerful face; for the doctor never looked more cheerful than when he was drawing Grizel away from the ugly past, and he talked to her as if he had noticed nothing; but after he went upstairs he would pace his bedroom for a long time; and Grizel listened, and knew that he was thinking about her.  Then, perhaps, she would run up to him, and put her arms around his neck.  These scenes brought the doctor and Grizel very close together; but they became rarer as she grew up, and