efforts that
this must be done--if it be done. Ten, nay, twenty pages of the
finest descriptive writing that ever fell from the pen of a novelist
will not do it.

Clara Desmond, when young Fitzgerald first saw her, had hardly
attained that incipient stage of womanhood which justifies a mother
in taking her out into the gaieties of the world. She was then only
sixteen; and had not in her manner and appearance so much of the
woman as is the case with many girls of that age. She was shy and
diffident in manner, thin and tall in person. If I were to say that
she was angular and bony, I should disgust my readers, who, disliking
the term, would not stop to consider how many sweetest girls are
at that age truly subject to those epithets. Their undeveloped but
active limbs are long and fleshless, the contour of their face is the
same, their elbows and shoulders are pointed, their feet and hands
seem to possess length without breadth. Birth and breeding have given
them the frame of beauty, to which coming years will add the soft
roundness of form, and the rich glory of colour. The plump, rosy
girl of fourteen, though she also is very sweet, never rises to such
celestial power of feminine grace as she who is angular and bony,
whose limbs are long, and whose joints are sharp.

Such was Clara Desmond at sixteen. But still, even then, to those
who were gifted with the power of seeing, she gave promise of great
loveliness. Her eyes were long and large, and wonderfully clear.
There was a liquid depth in them which enabled the gazer to look down
into them as he would into the green, pellucid transparency of still
ocean water. And then they said so much--those young eyes of hers:
from her mouth in those early years words came but scantily, but from
her eyes questions rained quicker than any other eyes could answer
them. Questions of wonder at what the world contained,--of wonder as
to what men thought and did; questions as to the inmost heart, and
truth, and purpose of the person questioned. And all this was asked
by a glance now and again; by a glance of those long, shy, liquid
eyes, which were ever falling on the face of him she questioned, and
then ever as quickly falling from it.

Her face, as I have said, was long and thin, but it was the longness
and thinness of growing youth. The natural lines of it were full of
beauty, of pale silent beauty, too proud in itself to boast itself
much before the world, to make itself common am