y
to Mr. Palliser. There had been in former days matters difficult of
arrangement between those two; but I think that those old passages
had now been forgotten by them both. Phineas was, therefore, driven
to depend exclusively on Madame Max Goesler for conversation, and
he found that he was not called upon to cast his seed into barren
ground.

Up to that moment he had never heard of Madame Max Goesler. Lady
Glencora, in introducing them, had pronounced the lady's name so
clearly that he had caught it with accuracy, but he could not surmise
whence she had come, or why she was there. She was a woman probably
something over thirty years of age. She had thick black hair, which
she wore in curls,--unlike anybody else in the world,--in curls which
hung down low beneath her face, covering, and perhaps intended to
cover, a certain thinness in her cheeks which would otherwise have
taken something from the charm of her countenance. Her eyes were
large, of a dark blue colour, and very bright,--and she used them in
a manner which is as yet hardly common with Englishwomen. She seemed
to intend that you should know that she employed them to conquer
you, looking as a knight may have looked in olden days who entered a
chamber with his sword drawn from the scabbard and in his hand. Her
forehead was broad and somewhat low. Her nose was not classically
beautiful, being broader at the nostrils than beauty required, and,
moreover, not perfectly straight in its line. Her lips were thin.
Her teeth, which she endeavoured to show as little as possible, were
perfect in form and colour. They who criticised her severely said,
however, that they were too large. Her chin was well formed, and
divided by a dimple which gave to her face a softness of grace which
would otherwise have been much missed. But perhaps her great beauty
was in the brilliant clearness of her dark complexion. You might
almost fancy that you could see into it so as to read the different
lines beneath the skin. She was somewhat tall, though by no means
tall to a fault, and was so thin as to be almost meagre in her
proportions. She always wore her dress close up to her neck, and
never showed the bareness of her arms. Though she was the only woman
so clad now present in the room, this singularity did not specially
strike one, because in other respects her apparel was so rich and
quaint as to make inattention to it impossible. The observer who did
not observe very closely would per