Page:The Europeans (1st edition) Volume 1.djvu/19

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I.]
THE EUROPEANS.
7

looked at it for some time; for reasons of her own she thought it the ugliest thing she had ever seen. She hated it, she despised it; it threw her into a state of irritation that was quite out of proportion to any sensible motive. She had never known herself to care so much about church-spires.

She was not pretty; but even when it expressed perplexed irritation her face was most interesting and agreeable. Neither was she in her first youth; yet, though slender, with a great deal of extremely well-fashioned roundness of contour—a suggestion both of maturity and flexibility—she carried her three-and-thirty years as a light-wristed Hebe might have carried a brimming wine-cup. Her complexion was