elder was a fine-looking woman, and one who prided herself upon the Junoesque proportions which she occasionally exhibited in a stroll for exercise up and down the aisle.  Yet no one would call her a beauty.  Her eyes were of a somewhat fishy and uncertain blue; the lids were tinged with an unornamental pink that told of irritation of the adjacent interior surface and of possible irritability of temper.  Her complexion was of that mottled type which is so sore a trial to its possessor and yet so inestimable a comfort to social rivals; but her features were handsome, her teeth fine, her dress, bearing, and demeanor those of a woman of birth and breeding, and yet one who might have resented the intimation that she was not strikingly handsome.  She looked like a woman with a will of her own; her head was high, her step was firm; it was of just such a walk as hers that Virgil wrote his “vera incessu patuit dea,” and she made the young man in the section by himself think of that very passage as he glanced at her from under his heavy, bushy eyebrows.  She looked, moreover, like a woman with a capacity for influencing people contrary to their will and judgment, and with a decided fondness for the exercise of that unpopular function.  There was the air of grande dame about her, despite the simplicity of her dress, which, though of rich material, was severely plain.  She wore no jewelry.  Her hands were snugly gloved, and undisfigured by the distortions of any ring except the marriage circlet.  Her manner attested her a person of consequence in her social circle and one who realized the fact.  She had repelled, though without rudeness or discourtesy, the garrulous efforts of the motherly knitter to be sociable.  She had promptly inspired the small, candy-crusted explorer with such awe that he had refrained from further visits after his first confiding attempt to poke a sticky finger through the baby’s velvety cheek.  She had spared little scorn in her rejection of the bourgeois advances of the commercial traveller with the languishing eyes of Israel:  he confided to his comrades, in relating the incident, that she was smart enough to see that it wasn’t her he was hankering to know, but the pretty sister by her side; and when challenged to prove that they were sisters,—­a statement which aroused the scepticism of his shrewd associates,—­he had replied, substantially,—­

“How do I know?  ’Cause I saw their pass before you was up this morning, cully.  It’s for Mrs. Captain Rayner and sister, and they’re going out here to Fort Warrener.  That’s how I know.”  And the porter of the car had confirmed the statement in the sanctity of the smoking-room.