Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER X Candles were burning on a mahogany lowboy against the wainscot of a dark-ceiled room, but Madam’s face was seen more by the remaining light from a western window next the chimney-piece, toward which her chair had been moved from the tea-table. Her head, in a majestic cap with a black ribbon round the crown, was bent forward, her hands extended peacefully on the chair-arms; her chin was sunk in the folds of a lace neckerchief crossed over her large, old woman’s bosom, that rested on the corresponding eminence beneath. Catherine at first was disappointed in this revered agent of so many personal destinies, to see only an elderly woman with rather heavy features, whose corpulence filled an armchair of the largest dimensions. But when Madam raised her cap-crowned head, sighed, and opened her dark, penetrating eyes with that look in them of saddened power, and smiled her sovereign smile that comprehended the whole group with its quiet, sustained kindness, the little girl knew that this was the first great lady she had ever seen. She fitted, to the eye of an artist, the peaceful, dignified room, with its details of homely comfort, and its rich, repressed atmosphere of the past. The row of carved, high-backed chairs against the shadowy wainscot belonged to the period of the portraits on the walls. Not a romantic, hardly a handsome face among them, but as real as the firm, hard touch of the painter could make them; men who would not have been flattered to be prettilled; keen, large-brained, tolerant, wise in the wisdom of the world, strong in administration, sure in finance, honest in diplomacy, generous in friendship, faithful to family and religion. Madam knew that she came of good stock; her great grief was that she could not help to perpetuate it in children of h…
