inviting mouth, so modified this that the total impression was that of high spirit and great sweetness of character.  It was the sort of face from which one might expect passionate love or unflinching martyrdom.  Her voice had a quality the memory of which lingered longer even than the expression of her eyes; it was low, and, as one might say, a fruity voice, not quite clear, though sweet, as if veiled in femineity.  This note of royal womanhood was also in her figure, a little more than medium in height, and full of natural grace.  Somehow Edith, with all these good points, had not the reputation of a belle or a beauty—­perhaps for want of some artificial splendor—­but one could not be long in her company without feeling that she had great charm, without which beauty becomes insipid and even commonplace, and with which the plainest woman is attractive.

Edith’s theory of life, if one may so dignify the longings of a young girl, had been very simple, and not at all such as would be selected by the heroine of a romance.  She had no mission, nor was she afflicted by that modern form of altruism which is a yearning for notoriety by conspicuous devotion to causes and reforms quite outside her normal sphere of activity.  A very sincere person, with strong sympathy for humanity tempered by a keen perception of the humorous side of things, she had a purpose, perhaps not exactly formulated, of making the most out of her own life, not in any outward and shining career, but by a development of herself in the most helpful and harmonious relations to her world.  And it seemed to her, though she had never philosophized it, that a marriage such as she believed she had made was the woman’s way to the greatest happiness and usefulness.  In this she followed the dictates of a clear mind and a warm heart.  If she had reasoned about it, considering how brief life is, and how small can be any single contribution to a better social condition, she might have felt more strongly the struggle against nature, and the false position involved in the new idea that marriage is only a kind of occupation, instead of an ordinance decreed in the very constitution of the human race.  With the mere instinct of femineity she saw the falseness of the assumption that the higher life for man or woman lies in separate and solitary paths through the wilderness of this world.  To an intelligent angel, seated on the arch of the heavens, the spectacle of the latter-day pseudo-philosophic and economic dribble about the doubtful expediency of having a wife, and the failure of marriage, must seem as ludicrous as would a convention of birds or of flowers reasoning that the processes of nature had continued long enough.  Edith was simply a natural woman, who felt rather than reasoned that in a marriage such as her heart approved she should make the most of her life.