There was
beauty, but I could not see it then; it was not of the kind I
longed for. In the next pew sat a family who were my especial
aversion. There were five daughters, the eldest not above
four-and-twenty,--yet they had the old fairy, knowing
look, hard, dry, dwarfed, strangers to the All-Fair,--were
working-day residents in this beautiful planet. They looked
as if their thoughts had never strayed beyond the jobs of the
day, and they were glad of it. Their mother was one of those
shrunken, faded patterns of woman who have never done anything
to keep smooth the cheek and dignify the brow. The father
had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness, and entire
self-complacency. I could not endure this family, whose
existence contradicted all my visions; yet I could not forbear
looking at them.
'As my eye one day was ranging about with its accustomed
coldness, and the proudly foolish sense of being in a shroud
of thoughts that were not their thoughts, it was arrested by
a face most fair, and well-known as it seemed at first
glance,--for surely I had met her before and waited for her
long. But soon I saw that she was a new apparition foreign to
that scene, if not to me.
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