Page:The Europeans (1st edition) Volume 1.djvu/57

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
II.]
THE EUROPEANS.
45

She was tall and pale, thin and a little awkward; her hair was fair and perfectly straight; her eyes were dark, and they had the singularity of seeming at once dull and restless—differing herein, as you see, fatally from the ideal "fine eyes," which we always imagine to be both brilliant and tranquil. The doors and windows of the large square house were all wide open, to admit the purifying sunshine, which lay in generous patches upon the floor of a wide, high, covered piazza adjusted to two sides of the mansion—a piazza on which several straw-bottomed rocking-chairs and half-a-dozen of those small cylindrical stools in green and blue porcelain, which suggest an affiliation between the residents and the Eastern trade,