Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface. Their nature moreprecisely, and as modified by the creeping hours of time, was known only to those who watched thecircumstances of her history.Personally, she was the combination of very interesting particulars, whose rarity, however, lay inthe combination itself rather than in the individual elements combined. As a matter of fact, you didnot see the form and substance of her features when conversing with her; and this charming powerof preventing a material study of her lineaments by an interlocutor, originated not in the cloakingeffect of a well-formed manner (for her manner was childish and scarcely formed), but in theattractive crudeness of the remarks themselves. She had lived all her life in retirement-themonstrari gigito of idle men had not flattered her, and at the age of nineteen or twenty she was nofurther on in social consciousness than an urban young lady of fifteen.One point in her, however, you did notice: that was her eyes. In them was seen a sublimation ofall of her; it was not necessary to look further: there she lived.These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance-blue as the blue we see between the retreatingmouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny September morning. A misty and shady blue, thathad no beginning or surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT.As to her presence, it was not powerful; it was weak. Some women can make their personalitypervade the atmosphere of a whole banqueting hall; Elfride's was no more pervasive than that of akitten.Elfride had as her own the thoughtfulness which appears in the face of the Madonna della Sedia, without its rapture: the warmth and spirit of the type of woman's feature most common to thebeauties-mortal and immortal-of Rubens, without their insistent fleshiness. The characteristicexpression of the female faces of Correggio-that of the yearning human thoughts that lie too deepfor tears-was hers sometimes, but seldom under ordinary conditions.The point in Elfride Swancourt's life at which a deeper current may be said to have permanentlyset in, was one winter afternoon when she found herself standing, in the character of hostess, face toface with a man she had never seen before-moreover, looking at him with a Miranda-like curiosityand interest that she had never yet bestowed on a mortal.On this particular day her father, the vicar of a parish on the sea-swept outskirts of LowerWessex, and a widower, was suffering from an attack of gout. After finishing her householdsupervisions Elfride became restless, and several times left the room, ascended the staircase, andknocked at her father's chamber-door.'Come in!' was always answered in a hearty out-of-door voice from the inside.'Papa, ' she said on one occasion to the fine, red-faced, handsome man of forty, who, puffing andfizzing like a bursting bottle, lay on the bed wrapped in a dressing-gown, and every now and thenenunciating, in spite of himself, about one letter of some word or words that were almost oaths;'papa, will you not come downstairs this evening?' She spoke distinctly: he was rather dea