Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain; and the Lord looketh on the heart and not on the outward appearance." "But I wasn't thinking of the Lord," replied Elisabeth: "I was thinking of other people; and they love you much more if you are pretty than if you aren't." "That is not so," said Miss Farringdon--and she believed she was speaking the truth; "if you serve God and do your duty to your neighbour, you will find plenty of people ready to love you; and especially if you carry yourself well and never stoop." Like many another elect lady, Cousin Maria regarded beauty of face as a vanity, but beauty of figure as a virtue; and to this doctrine Elisabeth owed the fact that her back always sloped in the opposite direction to the backs of the majority of people.
But it would have surprised Miss Farringdon to learn how little real effect her strict Methodist training had upon Elisabeth; fortunately, however, few elder people ever do learn how little effect their training has upon the young committed to their charge; if it were so, life would be too hard for the generation that has passed the hill-top.

Elisabeth's was one of those happy, pantheistic natures that possess the gift of finding God everywhere and in everything.

She early caught the Methodist habit of self-analysis and introspection, but in her it did not develop--as it does in more naturally religious souls--into an almost morbid conscientiousness and self-depreciation; she merely found an artistic and intellectual pleasure in taking the machinery of her soul to pieces and seeing how it worked.
In those days--and, in fact, in all succeeding ones--Elisabeth lived in a world of imagination.

There was not a nook in the garden of the Willows which was not peopled by creatures of her fancy.

At this particular time she was greatly fascinated by the subject of heathen mythology, as set forth in Mangnall's Questions, and had devoted herself to the service of Pallas Athene, having learned that that goddess was (like herself) not surpassingly beautiful, and was, moreover, handicapped by the possession of gray eyes.