all the gifts bestowed
upon their sex that of beauty has so immeasurably the greatest power
that nothing else can for one moment be compared with it, that all other
gifts, of whatsoever nature and extent, sink into insignificance and
powerlessness beside it. It is, of course, to the interest of domestic
men, the good husbands and fathers who are satisfied with home comforts
and home productions, and desire nothing so much as peace at the
hearth-stone, to deny this fact, to qualify it as much as possible, and
reduce its universality. But the denials of these few, contented,
low-flying gentlemen are lost in the great tide of world-wide agreement,
and no one is deceived by them, save, in occasional instances, their own
wives, who in that case have been endowed by nature with much faith (or
is it self-complacence?), and powers of observation not much beyond
those of the oyster. But on that long New England coast already spoken
of, and in those pleasant, pretty towns of the Middle States,
observation has been keenly cultivated, and self-complacence held in
abeyance by much analysis. All the northern sisters who lived there
would probably have answered again, and with one voice, that with simply
the most ordinary good qualities in addition, a girl as beautiful as
Edgarda Thorne would carry all before her in any case.

Garda was of medium height, but her litheness made her seem tall. This
litheness had in it none of the meagre outlines of the little mother,
its curves were all moulded with that soft roundness which betrays a
southern origin. But the observer was not left to this evidence alone,
there was further and indisputable proof in her large, dark, beautiful,
wholly Spanish eyes. She had, in truth, been well described by Mrs.
Thorne's phrase--"the portrait of her Spanish grandmother, painted in
English colors." The tints of her complexion were very different from
the soft, unchanging, creamy line which had been one of the beauties of
the beautiful Ines de Duero; Garda's complexion had the English
lightness and brightness. But it was not merely pink and white; there
were browns under its warm fairness--browns which gave the idea that it
was acquainted with the open air, the sun, the sea, and enjoyed them
all. It never had that blue look of cold which mars at times the beauty
of all women who are delicately fair; it never had the fatal shade of
yellow that menaces the brunette. It was a complexion made for all times
and al