gings," and taken out a leathern
spirit-case containing four bottles, with a couple of wine-glasses. This
case she placed on the table before Mr., Losely, and contemplated him at
leisure while he helped himself to the raw spirits.

As she thus stood, an acute student of Lavater might have recognized, in
her harsh and wasted countenance, signs of an original nature superior
to that of her visitor; on her knitted brow, a sense higher in quality
than on his smooth low forehead; on her straight stern lip, less cause
for distrust than in the false good-humour which curved his handsome
mouth into that smile of the fickle, which, responding to mirth but not
to affection, is often lighted and never warmed. It is true that in that
set pressure of her lip there might be cruelty, and, still more, the
secretiveness which can harbour deceit; and yet, by the nervous workings
of that lip, when relieved from such pressure, you would judge the
woman to be rather by natural temperament passionate and impulsive than
systematically cruel or deliberately-false,--false or cruel only as some
predominating passion became the soul's absolute tyrant, and adopted
the tyrant's vices. Above all, in those very lines destructive to beauty
that had been ploughed, not by time, over her sallow cheeks, there was
written the susceptibility to grief, to shame, to the sense of fall,
which was not visible in the unreflective, reckless aspect of the sleek
human animal before her.

In the room, too, there were some evidences of a cultivated taste. On
the walls, book-shelves, containing volumes of a decorous and severe
literature, such as careful parents allow to studious daughters,--the
stately masterpieces of Fenelon and Racine; selections approved by
boarding-schools from Tasso, Dante, Metastasio; amongst English authors,
Addison, Johnson, Blair (his lectures as well as sermons); elementary
works on such sciences as admit female neophytes into their porticos,
if not into their penetralia,--botany, chemistry, astronomy. Prim
as soldiers on parade stood the books,--not a gap in their
ranks,--evidently never now displaced for recreation; well bound, yet
faded, dusty; relics of a bygone life. Some of them might perhaps have
been prizes at school, or birthday gifts from proud relations. There,
too, on the table, near the spirit-case, lay open a once handsome
workbox,--no silks now on the skeleton reels; discoloured, but not by
use, in its nest of tarnished silk