Reality,--what a delight it is! The actual touch and feeling of the spontaneous natural creature have been so buried beneath centuries of hypocrisy and humbug that we have ceased to believe in them save as a metaphysical abstraction.

But even as water, long depressed under-ground in perverse channels, surges up to the surface, and above it, at last, in a fountain of relief, so Nature, after enduring ages of outrage and banishment, leaps back to her rightful domain in some individual whom we call extraordinary because he or she is natural.
Grace Parsloe did not seem (regarded as to her temperament and quality) to belong where she was: therefore she was a delightful incident there.
Had she been met with in the days of the Old Testament, or in the depths of Persia or India at the present time, even, she might have appeared commonplace.

But here she was in conventional costume, with conventional manners.

And, just as the nautch-girls, and other Oriental dancers and posturers, wear a costume which suggests nature more effectively than does nature itself, so did Grace's conventionality suggest to Freeman the essential absence of conventionality more forcibly than if he had seen her clad in a turban and translucent caftan, dancing off John the Baptist's head, or driving a nail into that of Sisera.

Grace certainly owed much of her importance to her situation, which rendered her foreign and piquante.