For some time after his marriage, he appeared at his wife's parties oftener than he otherwise would have done, just for the sake of having an eye upon Sepia; but had seen nothing, nor the shadow of anything--until one night, by the merest chance, happening to enter his wife's drawing-room, he caught a peculiar glance between Sepia and a young man--not very young--who had just entered, and whom he had not seen before.
To not a few it seemed strange that, with her unquestioned powers of fascination, she had not yet married; but London is not the only place in which poverty is as repellent as beauty is attractive.

At the same time it must be confessed there was something about her which made not a few men shy of her.

Some found that, if her eyes drew them within a certain distance, there they began to repel them, they could not tell why.

Others felt strangely uncomfortable in her presence from the first.

Not only much that a person has done, but much of what a person is capable of, is, I suspect, written on the bodily presence; and, although no human eye is capable of reading more than here and there a scattered hint of the twilight of history, which is the aurora of prophecy, the soul may yet shudder with an instinctive foreboding it can not explain, and feel the presence, without recognizing the nature, of the hostile.
Sepia's eyes were her great power.