With the distrustful introspection of maiden youth, she suddenly asked
herself whether by any possibility she were different from other girls
and whether she had not some strange defect, physical or mental, of
which the existence had been most carefully concealed from her all her
life. In the quick impulse she rose and brought all the burning candles
to the toilet table, and lighted others, and stood before the mirror, in
the yellow light, gazing most critically at her own reflexion. She
looked long and earnestly and quite without vanity. She told herself,
cataloguing her looks, that her hair was neither black nor brown, but
that it was very thick and long and waved naturally; that her eyes were
very dark, with queer little angles just above the lids, under the
prominent brows; that her nose, seen in full face, looked very straight
and rather small, though she had been told by the girls in the convent
that it was aquiline and pointed; that her cheeks were thin and almost
colourless; that her chin was round and smooth and prominent, her lips
rather dark than red, and modelled in a high curve; that her ears were
very small--she threw back the heavy hair to see them better, turning
her face sideways to the glass; that her throat was over-slender, and
her neck and arms far too thin for beauty, but with a young leanness
which might improve with time, though nothing could ever make them
white. She was dark, on the whole. She was willing to admit that she was
sallow, that her eyes had a rather sad look in them, and even that one
was almost imperceptibly larger than the other, though the difference
was so small that she had never noticed it before, and it might be due
to the uncertain light of the candles in the dim room.
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