It was only natural that he should give even more thought to her than to her quaint and unfamiliar old Ethiopian name.  She was undoubtedly a very smart woman.  To his surprise she had never introduced in her talk any of the stock religious and devotional phrases which official Methodists so universally employed in mutual converse.  She might have been an insurance agent, or a school-teacher, visiting in a purely secular household, so little parade of cant was there about her.

He caught himself wondering how old she was.  She seemed to have been pretty well over the whole American continent, and that must take years of time.  Perhaps, however, the exertion of so much travel would tend to age one in appearance.  Her eyes were still youthful—­decidedly wise eyes, but still juvenile.  They had sparkled with almost girlish merriment at some of his jokes.  She turned them about a good deal when she spoke, making their glances fit and illustrate the things she said.  He had never met any one whose eyes played so constant and prominent a part in their owner’s conversation.  Theron had never seen a play; but he had encountered the portraits of famous queens of the drama several times in illustrated papers or shop windows, and it occurred to him that some of the more marked contortions of Sister Soulsby’s eyes—­notably a trick she had of rolling them swiftly round and plunging them, so to speak, into an intent, yearning, one might almost say devouring, gaze at the speaker—­were probably employed by eminent actresses like Ristori and Fanny Davenport.

The rest of Sister Soulsby was undoubtedly subordinated in interest to those eyes of hers.  Sometimes her face seemed to be reviving temporarily a comeliness which had been constant in former days; then again it would look decidedly, organically, plain.  It was the worn and loose-skinned face of a nervous, middle-aged woman, who had had more than her share of trouble, and drank too much tea.  She wore the collar of her dress rather low; and Theron found himself wondering at this, because, though long and expansive, her neck certainly showed more cords and cavities than consorted with his vague ideal of statuesque beauty.  Then he wondered at himself for thinking about it, and abruptly reined up his fancy, only to find that it was playing with speculations as to whether her yellowish complexion was due to that tea-drinking or came to her as a legacy of Southern blood.

He knew that she was born in the South because she said so.  From the same source he learned that her father had been a wealthy planter, who was ruined by the war, and sank into a premature grave under the weight of his accumulated losses.  The large dark rings around her eyes grew deeper still in their shadows when she told about this, and her ordinarily sharp voice took on a mellow cadence, with a soft, drawling accent, turning U’s into O’s, and having no R’s to speak of.  Theron had imbibed somewhere in early days the conviction that the South was the land of romance, of cavaliers and gallants and black eyes flashing behind mantillas and outspread fans, and somehow when Sister Soulsby used this intonation she suggested all these things.