er billowy white
hair? Her handsome soft old face, with its smooth skin, and the good
strong bony structure underneath? Her beautiful old grey eyes, full of
tenderness and shrewdness, of curiosity, irony, indulgence, overarched
and emphasized by regular black eyebrows? Her pretty little plump
pink-white hands, (like two little elderly Cupids), with their shining
panoply of rings? And her luxurious, courageous, high-hearted manner of
dressing? The light colours and jaunty fashion of her gowns? Her laces,
ruffles, embroideries? Her gay little bonnets? Her gems? Linda Baroness
Blanchemain, of Fring Place, Sussex; Belmore Gardens, Kensington; and
Villa Antonina, San Remo: big, merry, sociable, sentimental,
worldly-wise, impetuous Linda Blanchemain: do you know her? If you do,
I am sure you love her and rejoice in her; and enough is said. If you
don't, I beg leave to present and to commend her.

I spoke, by the bye, of her "old" face, her "old" eyes. She is, to be
sure, in so far as mere numbers of years tell, an old woman. But I once
heard her throw out, in the heat of conversation, the phrase, "a young
old thing like me;" and I thought she touched a truth.

III

Well, then, the footman, in his masterful way, pulled the bell-cord;
Lady Blanchemain contemplated the landscape, and had her opinion of a
generation that could liken it to the drop-scene of a theatre; and in
due process of things the bell was answered.

It was answered by a man in a costume that struck my humorous old friend
as pleasing: a sallow little man whose otherwise quite featureless suit
of tweeds was embellished by scarlet worsted shoulder-knots. With
lack-lustre eyes, from behind the plexus of the grille, he rather
stolidly regarded the imposing British equipage, and waited to be
addressed.

Lady Blanchemain addressed him in the language of Pistoja. Might one,
she inquired, with her air of high affability, in her distinguished old
voice, might one visit the castle?--a question purely of convention, for
she had not come hither without an assurance from her guide-book.

Shoulder-knots, however,--either to flaunt his attainments, or because
indeed Pistoiese (what though the polyglot races of Italy have agreed
upon it as a lingua franca) offered the greater difficulties to his
Lombardian tongue,--replied in French.

"I do not think so, Madame," was his reply, in a French sufficiently
heavy and stiff-jointed, enforced by a dubious oscillation