ragmentary. She is a series of
unfinished sketches in various manners. She has her being in the past
tense, and her future, if she could have it after her taste, would be
the past made present. She has many aspirations, and few of them are
realized, but all of them are sketched in faint hues upon the mist of
her mediaeval atmosphere. She is, in the language of a lyric from her own
pen,

"The shadow of fair and of joyous impossible, infinite, faintness
That is cast on the mist of the sea by the light of the ages to come."

Her handwriting is Gothic. Her heart is of the type created by Mr.
Swinburne in the minds of those who do not understand him,--in their
minds, for in the flesh the type is not found. Moreover, she resents
modernness of every kind, including the steam-engine, the electric
telegraph, the continent of North America, and myself. Her political
creed shadows forth the government of the future as a pleasant
combination of communism and knight-baronry, wherein all oppressed
persons shall have republics, and all nice people shall wear armor, and
live in castles, and strew the floors of their rooms with rushes and
their garments with the anatomic monstrosities of heraldic blazon.

As for religion, her mind is disturbed in its choice between a palatable
form of Buddhism and a particularly luscious adaptation of Greek
mythology; but in either case as much Christianity would be
indispensable as would give the whole a flavor of crusading. I hope I am
not hard upon Miss Chrysophrasia, but the fact is she is not--what shall
I say?--not sympathetic to me. John Carvel does not often speak of her,
but he has more than once attempted to argue with her, and on these
occasions his sister-in-law invariably winds up her defense by remarking
very wearily that "argument is the negation of poetry, and, indeed, of
all that is fair and joyous."

Personally Miss Dabstreak is a faded blonde, with a very large nose, a
wide mouth garnished with imperfect teeth, a very thin figure of
considerable height, a poor complexion ill set off by scanty, straggling
fair hair; garments of unusual greenish hues, fitted in an unusual and
irregular manner, hang in fantastic folds about the angles of her frame,
and her attitudes are strange and improbable. I repeat that I do not
mean to be hard upon Chrysophrasia, but her looks are not much to my
taste. She is too strongly contrasted with her niece, Miss Carvel. There
is, besides, somethi