I met him at breakfast on the morning
after my arrival, and his reception of me was most friendly. We had
spoken together but for a few minutes, when one of the French windows,
that led from the breakfast-room into a shrubbery and flower-garden,
gently opened and admitted a lady, just then, as I afterwards learned,
in her nineteenth spring. I use this term almost unconsciously, for I
cannot even now, in the glowing summer of her life, dissociate her
image from that season of youth and joyousness. She was introduced to
me, with old-fashioned simplicity, as 'My grand-daughter, Agnes
Townley.' It is difficult to look at beauty through other men's eyes,
and, in the present instance, I feel that I should fail miserably in
the endeavour to stamp upon this blank, dead paper, any adequate idea
of the fresh loveliness, the rose-bud beauty of that young girl. I
will merely say, that her perfectly Grecian head, wreathed with wavy
_bandeaux_ of bright hair, undulating with golden light, vividly
brought to my mind Raphael's halo-tinted portraitures of the
Virgin--with this difference, that in place of the holy calm and
resignation of the painting, there was in Agnes Townley a sparkling
youth and life, that even amidst the heat and glare of a crowded
ball-room or of a theatre, irresistibly suggested and recalled the
freshness and perfume of the morning--of a cloudless, rosy morning of
May.
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