She has a red-brown rolling eye, too large for her face, and with sparks of both levity and ferocity; her forehead is high and narrow, her figure thin and a little stooping.

Her manners, her conversation, which she interlards with French, her very tastes and ambitions, are alike assumed; and the assumption is ungracefully apparent: Hoyden playing Cleopatra.

I should judge her to be incapable of truth.

In private life a girl of this description embroils the peace of families, walks attended by a troop of scowling swains, and passes, once at least, through the divorce court; it is a common and, except to the cynic, an uninteresting type.

On the throne, however, and in the hands of a man like Gondremark, she may become the authoress of serious public evils.
Gondremark, the true ruler of this unfortunate country, is a more complex study.