a rare and delicate beauty, which
had given her fame throughout the country-side, and she held the best
of it still, as one holds jewels in a worn casket, and as a poem
written in obsolete language contains still its first grace of
thought. Camilla's soft and slender body had none of those stiff,
distorted lines which come from resistance to the forced attitudes of
life. Her body and her soul had been amenable to all discipline. She
had leaned sweetly against her crosses, instead of straining away
from them with fierce cramps and agonies of resistance. In every
motion she had the freedom of utter yielding, which surpasses the
freedom of action. Camilla's graduated flounces of lilac silk,
slightly faded, having over it a little spraying mist of gray,
trimmed her full skirt to her slender waist, girdled with a narrow
ribbon fastened with a little clasp set with amethysts. A great
amethyst brooch pinned the lace at her throat. She wore a lace cap,
and over that, flung loosely, draping her shoulders and shading her
face with its soft mesh, a great shawl or veil of fine white lace
wrought with sprigs. Camilla's delicately spare cheeks were softly
pink, with that elderly bloom which lacks the warm dazzle of youth,
yet has its own late beauty. Her eyes were blue and clear as a
child's, and as full of innocent dreams--only of the past instead of
the future. Her blond hair, which in turning gray had got a creamy
instead of a silvery lustre, like her old lace, was looped softly and
disposed in half-curls over her ears. When she smiled it was with the
grace and fine dignity of ineffable ladyhood, and yet with the soft
ignorance, though none of the abandon, of childhood. Camilla was like
a child whose formal code and manners of life had been fully
prescribed and learned, but whose vital copy had not been quite set.

Lucina loved her aunt Camilla with a strange sense of comradeship,
and yet with awe. "If you can ever be as much of a lady as your aunt
Camilla, I shall be glad," her mother often told her. Camilla was to
Lucina the personification of the gentle and the genteel. She was her
ideal, the model upon which she was to form herself.

Camilla was so unceasingly punctilious in all the finer details of
living that all who infringed upon them felt her mere presence a
reproach. Children were never rough or loud-voiced or naughty when
Miss Camilla was near, though she never admonished otherwise than by
example. As for little Lucin