as
composedly as ever.

"It is the face of an idiot, isn't it?" pursued Miserrimus Dexter! "Look
at her! She is a mere vegetable. A cabbage in a garden has as much life
and expression in it as that girl exhibits at the present moment. Would
you believe there was latent intelligence, affection, pride, fidelity,
in such a half-developed being as this?"

I was really ashamed to answer him. Quite needlessly! The impenetrable
young woman went on with her master's beard. A machine could not
have taken less notice of the life and the talk around it than this
incomprehensible creature.

"_I_ have got at that latent affection, pride, fidelity, and the rest
of it," resumed Miserrimus Dexter. "_I_ hold the key to that dormant
Intelligence. Grand thought! Now look at her when I speak. (I named
her, poor wretch, in one of my ironical moments. She has got to like her
name, just as a dog gets to like his collar.) Now, Mrs. Valeria, look
and listen.--Ariel!"

The girl's dull face began to brighten. The girl's mechanically moving
hand stopped, and held the comb in suspense.

"Ariel! you have learned to dress my hair and anoint my beard, haven't
you?"

Her face still brightened. "Yes! yes! yes!" she answered, eagerly. "And
you say I have learned to do it well, don't you?"

"I say that. Would you like to let anybody else do it for you?"

Her eyes melted softly into light and life. Her strange unwomanly voice
sank to the gentlest tones that I had heard from her yet.

"Nobody else shall do it for me," she said at once proudly and tenderly.
"Nobody, as long as I live, shall touch you but me."

"Not even the lady there?" asked Miserrimus Dexter, pointing backward
with his hand-mirror to the place at which I was standing.

Her eyes suddenly flashed, her hand suddenly shook the comb at me, in a
burst of jealous rage.

"Let her try!" cried the poor creature, raising her voice again to its
hoarsest notes. "Let her touch you if she dares!"

Dexter laughed at the childish outbreak. "That will do, my delicate
Ariel," he said. "I dismiss your Intelligence for the present. Relapse
into your former self. Finish my beard."

She passively resumed her work. The new light in her eyes, the new
expression in her face, faded little by little and died out. In another
minute the face was as vacant and as lumpish as before; the hands did
their work again with the lifeless dexterity which had so painfully
impressed me when she first took up the