"His sisters were very agreeable women,--cultivated and lively, but proud as Lucifer, and desperately exclusive. A _nouveau riche_ was, in their eyes, equivalent to every thing that is odious and detestable; and to call a man a _parvenu_ was to steep him in infamy forever. The men at the house were, for the most part, of no great account--chiefly old bachelors, or sober family men run to seed, with a number of awkward young boobies not yet in bloom. The two ladies liked the company of a lazy fellow like me, a butterfly of society, with the poets, at least the sentimental ones, on my tongue's end, and the latest advices from the fashionable world. I staid there a week, and when that was over they persuaded me to stay another.
"On the day after, there was a fresh arrival,--a gentleman from Philadelphia, with his sister and his daughter. He only remained for the night, and went away in the morning, leaving the ladies behind. The sister was a starched old person,--a sort of purblind duenna, with grizzled hair, gold spectacles, and cap. The daughter I need not describe, for you saw her half an hour ago.
"Her family was good enough; her father a lawyer in Philadelphia. She was well educated--played admirably, and spoke excellent French and Italian. How much or how little she had frequented cultivated society, I do not know,--her own assertions went for nothing; but she had the utmost ease and grace of manner, and an invincible self-possession. Her ruling passion was a compound of vanity and pride, an insatiable craving for admiration and power. Whatever associates she happened to be among, nothing satisfied her but to be the cynosure of all eyes, the centre of all influence. I have known women enough,--women of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent; but such a one as she I never met but once. I shall not soon forget the evening when I first saw her, seated opposite me at the tea table. She was a small, light figure,--as you saw her just now,--the features, perhaps, a trifle too large. I never recall her, as she appeared at that time, without thinking of Byron's description of one of his mischief-making heroines:--
"'Her form had all the softness of her sex, Her features all the sweetness of the devil, When he put on the cherub to perplex Eve, and paved--God knows how--the road to evil.'