lant. But she was not profuse in demonstration save in her warmly affectionate letters, and, as the herself said, always found difficulty in expressing her feelings. Even to those she most loved caressing language was unusual with her; but the bright smile with which she would greet them, or the soft mockery which replied sometimes to laudatory and loving words, were as well worth having.
It is difficult to do justice to her unexacting character (self-assertion was, as we have said, impossible to her). The pain given by offences which in most other minds awaken some resentment, with her took shape only in a feeling of disappointment. "I am humbled who was humble," she once said, half pleasantly quoting Mrs. Browning on some such occasion. Only once, when an irresistible outpouring of her deeper thoughts by letter to one, a litterateur in whose intellectual sympathy she believed, was met by what seemed to be a cold repulse, and a fondly nursed hope thereby destroyed, did she show that she was wounded. But all that occurred was that her bright colour fled, she turned quite pale, and said in a faint voice, "I
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