The widow of an officer in the Engineers, she had settled, like many members of the martial miscellany, well within sight of the hereditary enemy, who however had left her leisure to form in spite of the difference of their years a close alliance with my mother.
She was the heartiest, the keenest, the ugliest of women, the least apologetic, the least morbid in her misfortune.

She carried it high aloft with loud sounds and free gestures, made it flutter in the breeze as if it had been the flag of her country.

It consisted mainly of a big red face, indescribably out of drawing, from which she glared at you through gold-rimmed aids to vision, optic circles of such diameter and so frequently displaced that some one had vividly spoken of her as flattering her nose against the glass of her spectacles.

She was extraordinarily near-sighted, and whatever they did to other objects they magnified immensely the kind eyes behind them.

Blest conveniences they were, in their hideous, honest strength--they showed the good lady everything in the world but her own queerness.