She never asked about Auguste, nor talked of her children.  Once she said they were at Madam somebody’s, she couldn’t think of the name, but a very nice school, she believed.  Everything was “very nice” or “very horrid.”  Much of the time she passed in draping herself in various finery before the mirror, and trying the effects of color on her complexion.  I could think of nothing but field-lilies, that toil not, and yet exceed Solomon in glory; sometimes it seemed gaudiness rather than glory, only that her brilliant complexion carried off the brightest hues, and made them only add to the native splendor of lip and eye.  Then she had a transparent complexion, where the blood rippled vividly and roseately at the least excitement.  This expressed a vivacity of temperament and a sensitiveness which yet she had not, so that I was constantly looking for more than there was in her, and as constantly disappointed.  The face suggested, and so did the conversation, far more both of native sensibility and of culture than she had of either.  This was apparent during the first twenty-four hours.

It may seem strange that I should cultivate such a disappointing acquaintance as Mrs. Lewis.  But, first, I liked Mr. Lewis, and he was much of the time in their parlor; and, secondly, Mrs. Lewis took a decided fancy to me, and that had its effect.  I could not deem her insensible to excellence of some sort; besides, she was a curious study to me, and besides, I had occasion, as the time wore on, to think more of her.  Our lives are threaded with black and gold, not of our own selecting, and we feel that we are guided by an Unseen Hand in many of our associations.

There was a want of arrangement of material in her mind, which prevented her from using what she knew, to any advantage; and what she knew, though it had the originality of first observation, and a grace of expression so great that more met the ear than was meant, was still so wanting, either in insight or reflection, as to be poor and vapid as small-beer after the first sparkle is gone.  The manner was all in Mrs. Lewis, but that was ever varying and charming.

One day she had been wrapping some green and gold gauzes about her, and draping herself so that you could think of nothing but sunsets and tulip-beds, when, in pulling over her finery, she came across a miniature of herself.  She handed it to me.

“This was what made William dead in love with me, before he saw me.  I used to wear my hair so for years after I married him; he liked me to.”

It was a very delicately painted miniature, by Staigg, I think.  Still a very good likeness, and with the perpetual childhood of the large brown eyes, and the clusters of chestnut curls over brow and neck, that gave an added expression of extreme youth to the face.

“Will she never mature?” I thought.