talk in an indescribably dry monotonous tone - a
tone without vibration or inflection - you felt as if a graven image of some bad
spirit were addressing you. But it was all a figment of fancy, a matter of
surface. Miss Mann's goblin-grimness scarcely went deeper than the
angel-sweetness of hundreds of beauties. She was a perfectly honest,
conscientious woman, who had performed duties in her day from whose severe
anguish many a human Peri, gazelle-eyed, silken-tressed, and silver-tongued,
would have shrunk appalled: she had passed alone through protracted scenes of
suffering, exercised rigid self-denial, made large sacrifices of time, money,
health, for those who had repaid her only by ingratitude, and now her main -
almost her sole - fault was, that she was censorious.
    Censorious she certainly was. Caroline had not sat five minutes ere her
hostess, still keeping her under the spell of that dread and Gorgon gaze, began
flaying alive certain of the families in the neighbourhood. She went to work at
this business in a singularly cool, deliberate manner, like some surgeon
practising with his scalpel on a lifeless subject: she made few distinctions;
she allowed scarcely any one to be good; she dissected impartially almost all
her acquaintance. If her auditress ventured now and then to put in a palliative
word, she set it aside with a certain disdain. Still, though thus pitiless in
moral anatomy, she was no scandal-monger: she never disseminated really
malignant or dangerous reports; it was not her heart so much as her temper that
was wrong.
    Caroline made this discovery for the first time to-day; and, moved thereby
to regret divers unjust judgments she had more than once passed on the crabbed
old maid, she began to talk to her softly, not in sympathizing words, but with a
sympathizing voice. The loneliness of her condition struck her visiter in a new
light; as did also the character of her ugliness, - a bloodless pallor of
complexion, and deeply worn lines of feature. The girl pitied the solitary and
afflicted woman; her looks told what she felt: a sweet countenance is never so
sweet as when the moved heart animates it with compassionate tenderness. Miss
Mann, seeing such a countenance raised to her, was touched in her turn: she
acknowledged her sense of the interest thus unexpectedly shown in her, who
usually met with only coldness and ridicule, by replying to her candidly.
Communicative on her own affairs she usually was not, because no one cared to
listen to her; but to-day