Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation
are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness
of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse.
Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings
in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship
with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa,
foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an
unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances,
instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.
BOOK I.
MISS BROOKE.
----
CHAPTER I.
"Since I can do no good because a woman,
Reach constantly at something that is near it.
--The Maid's Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into
relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that
she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which
the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile
as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity
from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion
gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or
from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
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