There Was Little Colour In Her Face, But The Features Were Perfect And The Mouth With Its Delicate Curves Quite Beautiful.

But after regarding her attentively for a minute or so, looking out impatiently for my bus at the same time, I said mentally:

"Yes, you are certainly very pretty, perhaps beautiful, but I don't like you and I don't want you. There's nothing in you to correspond to that nice outside. You are an exception to the rule that the beautiful is the good. Not that you are bad - actively, deliberately bad - you haven't the strength to be that or anything else; you have only a little shallow mind and a little coldish heart."

Now I can imagine one of my lady readers crying out: "How dared you say such monstrous things of any person after just a glance at her face?"

Listen to me, madam, and you will agree that I was not to blame for saying these monstrous things. All my life I've had the instinct or habit of seeing the things I see; that is to say, seeing them not as cloud or mist-shapes for ever floating past, nor as people in endless procession "seen rather than distinguished," but distinctly, separately, as individuals each with a character and soul of its very own; and while seeing it in that way some little unnamed faculty in some obscure corner of my brain hastily scribbles a label to stick on to the object or person before it passes out of sight. It can't be prevented; it goes on automatically; it isn't me, and I can no more interfere or attempt in any way to restrain or regulate its action than I can take my legs to task for running up a flight of steps without the mind's supervision.

But I haven't finished with the young lady yet. I had no sooner said what I have said and was just about to turn my eyes away and forget all about her, when, in response to some remarks of her aged companion, she laughed, and in laughing so great a change came into her face that it was as if she had been transformed into another being. It was like a sudden breath of wind and a sunbeam falling on the still cold surface of a woodland pool. The eyes, icily cold a moment before, had warm sunlight in them, and the half-parted lips with a flash of white teeth between them had gotten a new beauty; and most remarkable of all was a dimple which appeared and in its swift motions seemed to have a life of its own, flitting about the corner of the mouth, then further away to the middle of the cheek and back again. A dimple that had a story to tell. For dimples, too, like a delicate, mobile mouth, and even like eyes, have a character of their own. And no sooner had I seen that sudden change in the expression, and especially the dimple, than I knew the face; it was a face I was familiar with and was like no other face in the world, yet I could not say who she was nor where and when I had known her!

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