the face of any other woman in this age, and there were others
who called her an exaggerated milkmaid. She was tall, too, and had
learned so to walk as though half the world belonged to her.

Her niece, Miss Roanoke, was a lady of the same stamp, and of similar
beauty, with those additions and also with those drawbacks which
belong to youth. She looked as though she were four-and-twenty, but
in truth she was no more than eighteen. When seen beside her aunt,
she seemed to be no more than half the elder lady's size; and yet her
proportions were not insignificant. She, too, was tall, and was as
one used to command, and walked as though she were a young Juno. Her
hair was very dark,--almost black,--and very plentiful. Her eyes were
large and bright, though too bold for a girl so young. Her nose and
mouth were exactly as her aunt's, but her chin was somewhat longer,
so as to divest her face of that plump roundness which, perhaps,
took something from the majesty of Mrs. Carbuncle's appearance. Miss
Roanoke's complexion was certainly marvellous. No one thought that
she had been made beautiful for ever, for the colour would go and
come and shift and change with every word and every thought;--but
still it was there, as deep on her cheeks as on her aunt's, though
somewhat more transparent, and with more delicacy of tint as the
bright hues faded away and became merged in the almost marble
whiteness of her skin. With Mrs. Carbuncle there was no merging and
fading. The red and white bordered one another on her cheek without
any merging, as they do on a flag.

Lucinda Roanoke was undoubtedly a very handsome woman. It probably
never occurred to man or woman to say that she was lovely. She had
sat for her portrait during the last winter, and her picture had
caused much remark in the Exhibition. Some said that she might be a
Brinvilliers, others a Cleopatra, and others again a Queen of Sheba.
In her eyes as they were limned there had been nothing certainly of
love, but they who likened her to the Egyptian queen believed that
Cleopatra's love had always been used simply to assist her ambition.
They who took the Brinvilliers side of the controversy were men so
used to softness and flattery from women as to have learned to think
that a woman silent, arrogant, and hard of approach, must be always
meditating murder. The disciples of the Queen of Sheba school, who
formed, perhaps, the more numerous party, were led to their opinion
by the m