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Few women look so after they have entered their teens. Social artifice,
affectation, and the insatiate vanity that modern life encourages in the
feminine nature--all these things soon do away with the pellucid
clearness and steadfastness of the eye--the beautiful, true, untamed
expression, which, though so rare, is, when seen infinitely more
bewitching than all the bright arrows of coquetry and sparkling
invitation that flash from the glances of well-bred society dames, who
have taken care to educate their eyes if not their hearts. This girl was
evidently not trained properly; had she been so, she would have dropped
a curtain over those wide, bright windows of her soul; she would have
remembered that she was alone with a strange man at midnight--at
midnight, though the sun shone; she would have simpered and feigned
embarrassment, even if she could not feel it. As it happened, she did
nothing of the kind, only her expression softened and became more
wistful and earnest, and when she spoke again her voice was mellow with
a suave gentleness, that had something in it of compassion.


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