yes and black whiskers," added
Miss Halliday, in a meditative tone. "It is certainly a misfortune for
a person to have blacker eyes and whiskers than the rest of the world;
for there seems something stern and hard, and almost murderous, in such
excessive blackness."

Charlotte Halliday was a very different creature from the mother whom
Mr. Sheldon had absorbed into himself. Georgy was one of the women who
have "no characters at all," but Georgy's daughter was open to the
charge of eccentricity rather than of inanity. She was a creature of
fancies and impulses She had written wild verses in the secrecy of her
own chamber at midnight, and had torn her poetic effusions into a
thousand fragments the morning after their composition. She played and
sang very sweetly, and danced admirably, and did everything in a wild
way of her own, which was infinitely more charming than the commonplace
perfection of other women. She was not a beauty according to those
established rules which everybody believes in until they meet a woman
who sins against them all and yet is beautiful. Miss Halliday had thick
black eyebrows, and large gray eyes which people were apt to mistake
for black. She had a composite nose, and one of the sweetest mouths
that ever smiled upon enraptured mankind. Nature had given her just a
little more chin than a Greek sculptor would have allowed her; but, by
way of make-weight, the same careless Nature had bestowed upon her a
throat which Phidias himself might have sought in vain to improve upon.
And Nature had planted this young lady's head upon her shoulders with a
grace so rare that it must needs be a happy accident in the workmanship
of that immortal artist. Indeed it seemed as if Charlotte Halliday owed
her charms to a series of happy accidents. The black eyebrows which
made her face so piquant might have been destruction to another woman.
The round column-like throat needed a fine frank face to surmount it,
and the fine frank face was rendered gracious and womanly by the wealth
of waving dark hair which framed it. The girl was one of those bright
happy creatures whom men worship and women love, and whom envy can
scarcely dislike. She was so infinitely superior to both father and
mother, that a believer in hereditary attributes was fain to invent
some mythical great-grandmother from whom the girl's graces might have
been derived. But she had something of her father's easy good-nature
and imprudent generosity; and