She was both _unique_ and indescribable.
Most people impress us more, perhaps, by their outward and physical,
than by their inward and psychical life. On a first interview with them,
especially, we receive an impression of clothes, good or otherwise, of
beauty or plainness or ugliness of feature, and of correctness or
uncouthness of manner. These are the common people, whether ladies and
gentlemen, or simple men and women. There are, however, others, in all
ranks and conditions, so instinct and replete with spirit, that we
chiefly feel, when they have come in our way, that a spirit has passed
by,--that a new life has been brought in contact with our own life.
Of these was Miss Dudley. But because, ever since the day I write of, I
have loved to think of her, and because I know that, when I rejoin her,
I shall leave some behind me who will still love, and have a right to
hear of her, I will indulge myself in saying something more. That
something shall be what I said to myself then, as I promenaded to and
fro,--that bodily exercise was one of my safety-valves in those
times,--in the endeavor to work off so much of my superfluous animation
as to be in a state to sit down and paint again; and thus I spake: "I
must have had before me an uncommonly fine specimen of a class whose
existence I have conjectured before, but by no means including all the
wealthy, who wear their purple and fine linen both gracefully and
graciously, fare not more sumptuously than temperately every day, and do
a great deal, not only directly by their ready beneficence, but
indirectly by their sunny benignity, to light up the gloomy world of
Lazarus.
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