Violante was tall and slender, but her figure was not graceful.  People did not say of her that she was slender; they said she was thin.  And that was incontestably true.  She was very thin.  But her shoulders were high and square, and there was a sort of angularity and harshness about all the lines of her person.  Her head seemed somewhat too large for her body; and the upper part of it seemed too large for the lower portion.  She had a large, square forehead, white enough, but strongly marked with inequalities of surface, which, however much they might have delighted a phrenologist, were not conducive to girlish comeliness.  Her hair was of the very light reddish quality, which has not a single touch in it of that rich sunny auburn, which makes so many heads charming, red though they be.  Her face was perfectly white, yet not clear of complexion.  And the pale grey eyes beneath their all but colourless brows completed the impression of a general want of vigour and vitality.

A little before the end of that year in which the Ravenna impresario performed his memorable journey to Milan with the results that have been recorded, Violante di Marliani reached her twenty-third birthday; a few months before that day the Marchese Ludovico had reached his twenty-second.  It was a difference on the wrong side, but not so great as to form any serious objection to the proposed match.  But twenty-three is a rather mature age for an Italian noble lady to reach unmarried.  That such should have been the case with the Signora Violante was by no means because no suitor for her hand had ever presented himself.  Several such aspirants had entered the lists.  For the Contessa Violante was the great-niece of her great uncle.  But some of these had appeared objectionable to the Cardinal and his sister;—­who also were not at all likely to forget all that was due to the prospects arising from such a relationship, and all that it implied; and all of them had been objectionable to the young Contessa herself.

Violante’s expectations, indeed, in that line, or in any other of all the different ways in which happiness may come to mortals in this world, was very small.  For the first nine years of her life she had lived the only companion of a very miserable mother.  And all that mother’s misery had apparently come from the fact of her having a husband.  Those first years of the child’s life had been very sad; very monotonous, very depressing.  Perhaps the effect of them did but confirm the speciality of an idiosyncrasy, which would have been much the same without them.  But, at all events, when the child was brought to the house of her great-aunt, it seemed as if her mind and character had been too long and too uniformly toned to accord with sadness, for happiness to have any power of taking hold of her.