what would have been recognised by most men as a
beautiful girl. The specialties of her appearance, in the first place,
were in a great measure due to the singular mixture of races from
which she had sprung. One half of her blood was Jewish, one quarter
Scotch, and one quarter pure Brahmin. Her face was a long oval, too
long and too lanky towards the lower part of it for beauty. Her
complexion was somewhat dark, and not good. The mouth was mobile,
expressive, perhaps more habitually framed for pathos and the gentler
feelings, than for laughter. The jaw was narrow, the teeth good and
white, but not very regular. She had a magnificent wealth of very dark
brown hair, not without a gleam here and there of what descriptive
writers, of course, would call gold, but which really was more
accurately copper colour. And this grand and luxuriant wealth of hair
grew from the roots on the head to the extremity of it, at her waist,
when it was let down, in the most beautiful ripples. But the great
feature and glory of the face were the eyes, among the largest I
ever saw, of a deep clear grey, rather deeply set, and changing in
expression with every impression that passed over her mind. The
forehead was wide, and largely developed both in those parts of it
which are deemed to indicate imaginative and idealistic power, and
those that denote strongly marked perceptive and artistic faculties.
The latter perhaps were the more prominently marked. The Indian strain
showed itself in the perfect gracefulness of a very slender and
elastic figure, and in the exquisite elegance and beauty of the
modelling of the extremities.

That is not the description of a beautiful girl. But it is the fact
that the face and figure very accurately so described were eminently
attractive to me physically, as well as the mind and intelligence,
which informed them, were spiritually. They were much more attractive
to me than those of many a splendidly beautiful girl, the immense
superiority of whose beauty nobody knew better than I. Why should this
have been so? That is one of the mysteries to the solution of which no
moral or physical or psychical research has ever brought us an iota
nearer.

I am giving here an account of the first impression my future wife
made on me. I had no thought of wooing and winning her, for, as I have
said, I was not in a position to marry. Meanwhile she was becoming
acclimatised to Florentine society. She no longer looked _dowdy_ when