The two girls presented a striking contrast to each other. Clementina was fair and delicate, with soft hair, and those tender blue eyes, which to me are the most charming of all eyes. Ella was a noble creature; a figure and form the most perfect that I ever beheld--features of matchless symmetry--eyes dark, large, and lustrous--hair in floods of rich brown waves--a hand that was a model, from which statuaries contested to be allowed to copy--and a spirit, energy, and feeling in her gestures and countenance, that won your heart before you were aware.
It was upon her that Julian Winstanley doted. The other girl he thought, and called, a sweet girl, but his Ella was his darling. Nothing was too good for Ella; nothing was to be spared that could please or adorn Ella. To ride with her in the Park; to visit the box where she sat at the opera; sometimes in a party to hear her sing; seemed to give him a new pleasure.
Yet there was nothing in all this, unhappily, to rouse him to a better life; to break the chain of evil habits in which he was involved. Ella was a child of this world; an impetuous, proud, haughty beauty; a contemptuous disregarder of the weak, the wanting, and, above all, the low, or the ugly;--living for the day, as her father lived for the day--she for the day of vanity and pleasure; he for the day of vanity and sin. There was that difference, indeed, and it was a vast one; but he did not feel it.
There was no pure and holy influence of a higher and nobler life, diffused from the beautiful being. She was no angel of light. She was merely, to all appearance, a very fine, fashionable girl.
And Clementina, in her gentleness and softness, was little more. The good seed which Matty had sown, had fructified at first, but the briars and thorns were gathering fast around it. The pleasures of life were choking it up. It was in danger of being altogether lost.
Matty had long been gone. She had married a respectable tradesman, and was in a flourishing, though small, way of business. She would have been altogether forgotten long ago, only that she would not suffer this. She found herself still welcomed when she did come; for both the girls loved her, and she perfectly adored them. So she came, bringing her little offerings, from time to time--little matters such as she dealt in, in her shop--humble, but, for her sake, welcome. These two girls had both hearts. Where they got them I don't know.