The figure from the neck down was meagre, the stature insignificant, but the desire to please towered high, as well as the air of infallibly knowing how and of never, never missing it.

This was a little person whom I would have made a high bid for a good chance to paint.

The head, the features, the colour, the whole facial oval and radiance had a wonderful purity; the deep grey eyes--the most agreeable, I thought, that I had ever seen--brushed with a kind of winglike grace every object they encountered.

Their possessor was just back from Boulogne, where she had spent a week with dear Mrs.Floyd-Taylor: this accounted for the effusiveness of her reunion with dear Mrs.Meldrum.

Her black garments were of the freshest and daintiest; she suggested a pink- and-white wreath at a showy funeral.