assembly we go to, what miserable bones, what angular
elbows, what red skins, do we see under the cover of those capacious
sleeves, which are only one whit less ugly. At the time I speak of,
those coverings were not worn; and the white, round, dazzling arm of
Constance, bare almost to the shoulder, was girded by dazzling gems,
which at once set off, and were foiled by, the beauty of nature. Her
hair was of the most luxuriant, and of the deepest, black; and it was
worn in a fashion--then uncommon, without being bizarre--now hackneyed
by the plainest faces, though suiting only the highest order of
beauty--I mean that simple and classic fashion to which the French
have given a name borrowed from Calypso, but which appears to me suited
rather to an intellectual than a voluptuous goddess. Her long lashes,
and a brow delicately but darkly pencilled, gave additional eloquence
to an eye of the deepest blue, and a classic contour to a profile
so slightly aquiline, that it was commonly considered Grecian. That
necessary completion to all real beauty of either sex, the short and
curved upper lip, terminated in the most dazzling teeth and the ripe
and dewy under lip added to what was noble in her beauty that charm also
which is exclusively feminine. Her complexion was capricious; now pale,
now tinged with the pink of the sea-shell, or the softest shade of the
rose leaf: but in either it was so transparent, that you doubted which
became her the most. To these attractions, add a throat, a bust of the
most dazzling whiteness, and the justest proportions; a foot, whose
least beauty was its smallness, and a waist narrow--not the narrowness
of tenuity or constraint;--but round, gradual, insensibly less in its
compression:--and the person of Constance Vernon, in the bloom of her
youth, is before you.

She passed with her quiet and stately step from her room, through one
adjoining it, and which we stop to notice, because it was her customary
sitting-room when not with Lady Erpingham. There had Godolphin, with the
foreign but courtly freedom, the respectful and chivalric ease of his
manners, often sought her; there had he lingered in order to detain her
yet a moment and a moment longer from other company, seeking a sweet
excuse in some remark on the books that strewed the tables, or the music
in that recess, or the forest scene from those windows through which
the moon of autumn now stole with its own peculiar power to soften and
subdue. As