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'A fair vestal, throned in the west'

Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface Their naturehours of time, was known only to those atched the circumstances of her history

Personally, she was the co particulars, whose rarity, however, lay in the combination itself rather than in the individual elements combined As a matter of fact, you did not see the for with her; and this char a inated not in the cloaking effect of a well-formed manner (for her manner was childish and scarcely formed), but in the attractive crudeness of the remarks themselves She had lived all her life in retireito of idle e of nineteen or twenty she was no further on in social consciousness than an urban young lady of fifteen

One point in her, however, you did notice: that was her eyes In them was seen a sublimation of all of her; it was not necessary to look further: there she lived

These eyes were blue; blue as autu s of hills and woody slopes on a sunny Septe or surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT

As to her presence, it was not powerful; it eak Some women can make their personality pervade the at hall; Elfride's was no more pervasive than that of a kitten

Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the face of the Madonna della Sedia, without its rapture: the warmth and spirit of the type of woman's feature most common to the beauties--mortal and immortal--of Rubens, without their insistent fleshiness The characteristic expression of the fehts that lie too deep for tears--was hers sometimes, but seldom under ordinary conditions

The point in Elfride Swancourt's life at which a deeper current may be said to have permanently set in, was one winter afternoon when she found herself standing, in the character of hostess, face to face with aat him with a Miranda-like curiosity and interest that she had never yet bestowed on a mortal

On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the sea-swept outskirts of Lower Wessex, and a as suffering fro her household supervisions Elfride became restless, and several times left the room, ascended the staircase, and knocked at her father's chamber-door