After all, I believe the wisest of us must be beguiled in this way sometimes, and must think both better and worse of people than they deserve.  Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.  Long dark eyelashes, now—­what can be more exquisite?  I find it impossible not to expect some depth of soul behind a deep grey eye with a long dark eyelash, in spite of an experience which has shown me that they may go along with deceit, peculation, and stupidity.  But if, in the reaction of disgust, I have betaken myself to a fishy eye, there has been a surprising similarity of result.  One begins to suspect at length that there is no direct correlation between eyelashes and morals; or else, that the eyelashes express the disposition of the fair one’s grandmother, which is on the whole less important to us.

No eyelashes could be more beautiful than Hetty’s; and now, while she walks with her pigeon-like stateliness along the room and looks down on her shoulders bordered by the old black lace, the dark fringe shows to perfection on her pink cheek.  They are but dim ill-defined pictures that her narrow bit of an imagination can make of the future; but of every picture she is the central figure in fine clothes; Captain Donnithorne is very close to her, putting his arm round her, perhaps kissing her, and everybody else is admiring and envying her—­especially Mary Burge, whose new print dress looks very contemptible by the side of Hetty’s resplendent toilette.  Does any sweet or sad memory mingle with this dream of the future—­any loving thought of her second parents—­of the children she had helped to tend—­of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood even?  Not one.  There are some plants that have hardly any roots:  you may tear them from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over your ornamental flower-pot, and they blossom none the worse.  Hetty could have cast all her past life behind her and never cared to be reminded of it again.  I think she had no feeling at all towards the old house, and did not like the Jacob’s Ladder and the long row of hollyhocks in the garden better than other flowers—­perhaps not so well.  It was wonderful how little she seemed to care about waiting on her uncle, who had been a good father to her—­she hardly ever remembered to reach him his pipe at the right time without being told, unless a visitor happened to be there, who would have a better opportunity of seeing her as she walked across the hearth.  Hetty did not understand how anybody could be very fond of middle-aged people.  And as for those tiresome children, Marty and Tommy and Totty, they had been the very nuisance of her life—­as bad as buzzing insects that will come teasing you on a hot day when you want to be quiet.  Marty, the eldest, was a baby when she first came