She was by no means what would have been recognised by most men as a beautiful girl.  The specialties of her appearance, in the first place, were in a great measure due to the singular mixture of races from which she had sprung.  One half of her blood was Jewish, one quarter Scotch, and one quarter pure Brahmin.  Her face was a long oval, too long and too lanky towards the lower part of it for beauty.  Her complexion was somewhat dark, and not good.  The mouth was mobile, expressive, perhaps more habitually framed for pathos and the gentler feelings, than for laughter.  The jaw was narrow, the teeth good and white, but not very regular.  She had a magnificent wealth of very dark brown hair, not without a gleam here and there of what descriptive writers, of course, would call gold, but which really was more accurately copper colour.  And this grand and luxuriant wealth of hair grew from the roots on the head to the extremity of it, at her waist, when it was let down, in the most beautiful ripples.  But the great feature and glory of the face were the eyes, among the largest I ever saw, of a deep clear grey, rather deeply set, and changing in expression with every impression that passed over her mind.  The forehead was wide, and largely developed both in those parts of it which are deemed to indicate imaginative and idealistic power, and those that denote strongly marked perceptive and artistic faculties.  The latter perhaps were the more prominently marked.  The Indian strain showed itself in the perfect gracefulness of a very slender and elastic figure, and in the exquisite elegance and beauty of the modelling of the extremities.

That is not the description of a beautiful girl.  But it is the fact that the face and figure very accurately so described were eminently attractive to me physically, as well as the mind and intelligence, which informed them, were spiritually.  They were much more attractive to me than those of many a splendidly beautiful girl, the immense superiority of whose beauty nobody knew better than I. Why should this have been so?  That is one of the mysteries to the solution of which no moral or physical or psychical research has ever brought us an iota nearer.

I am giving here an account of the first impression my future wife made on me.  I had no thought of wooing and winning her, for, as I have said, I was not in a position to marry.  Meanwhile she was becoming acclimatised to Florentine society.  She no longer looked dowdy when entering a room, but very much the reverse; and the little Florentine world began to recognise that they had got something very much like a new Corinne among them.  But of course I rarely got a chance of monopolising her as I had done during that first afternoon.  We were however constantly meeting, and were becoming ever more and more close friends.  When the Garrows left Florence for the summer, I visited them at Lucerne, and subsequently met them at Venice.  It was the year of the meeting of the Scientific Congress in that city.