She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women.  This enabled her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so:  she might have been believed capable of sleeping without closing them up.  Assuming that the souls of men and women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s soul to be flame-like.  The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils gave the same impression.

The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver than to kiss.  Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl.  Viewed sideways, the closing-line of her lips formed, with almost geometric precision, the curve so well known in the arts of design as the cima-recta, or ogee.  The sight of such a flexible bend as that on grim Egdon was quite an apparition.  It was felt at once that the mouth did not come over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates whose lips met like the two halves of a muffin.  One had fancied that such lip-curves were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten marbles.  So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, each corner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear.  This keenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to sudden fits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment which she knew too well for her years.

Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in “Athalie”; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.  In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities.  The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on many respected canvases.

But celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon.  Her power was limited, and the consciousness of this limitation had biassed her development.  Egdon was her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was dark in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto.  Her appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and stifled warmth within her.  A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow, and not factitiously or with marks of constraint, for it had grown in her with years.