I sat down by her without being attracted at all—­rather repelled by the faint sickliness of everything connected with her appearance.  But neither her pale blue eyes, nor her yellow hair, nor her straw-colored gown and blue ribbons would have repelled me; I could not make her talk at all.  I never saw such reticence before or since.  As if she were determined “to die and make no sign,” she sat, bowing and smiling, and amounting to nothing, one way or another,—­giving no opinion, if asked, and asking no question.  She was passively polite, but so very near nothing that I was rejoiced when Mr. Remington entered with my husband, and proposed that we should go into the dining-room.  He carelessly introduced Mrs. Remington, but further than that seemed not to know she was in existence; and I must confess, I did not wonder.  While my husband made, or tried to make, some conversation with her, Mr. Remington showed me an exquisite Clytie in marble, and a landscape by Cole, which hung in a good light, and showed its wonderful wild beauty.  And now for the third reason that this was a white day.

VII.

In a little room connected with the refreshment-room there stood before a large mirror somebody winding a red scarf about her head.  I had only time to see that the head was small and shapely, and the figure full of flexible grace, when it turned and nodded to the party.  Of course, it could only be Mrs. Lewis, as she at once said, in a honey-sweet voice, and with what seemed to me a foreign accent; but then I had never heard the Southern accent, which is full of music, and seems somehow to avoid the sibilant tone as well as the nasal drawl characteristic of Northern tongues.

I was attracted to her, not by her beauty, though that was marked, but by her cordial, unaffected manner of placing her two hands in ours, and by her infantine sweetness of expression.  Whatever she might have gone through, I saw she had not suffered.  There was no line or track of experience, on her broad, tranquil brow, nor was there the hushed, restrained expression left in all eyes that have deeply mourned and bitterly wept.  The look was serene and youthful, with such happiness as might come from health and elemental life,—­such as a Dryad might have in her songful bowers, or a Naiad plunging in the surf.  But it was a shallow face, and pleased only as the sunshine does.  For my part, I would rather listen to the sorrowful song of the pine-tree:  that is the tune of life.

So, after the first five minutes, the face of Mrs. Lewis ceased to attract me, and I only wondered how she came to attract her husband.

At Miss Post’s, our rooms were quite near each other; and I frequently passed an hour in the morning with Mrs. Lewis, chatting with her, and looking about her fanciful apartment.  She had dozens of birds of all gay colors,—­paroquets from Brazil, cockatoos, ring-doves, and canaries; fresh flowers, in vases on the mantel-pieces, and a blue-ribboned guitar in the corner.  No books, no pictures.  A great many scarfs, bonnets, and drapery generally, fell about on the chairs and tables.