Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/266

258 appears in the only picture I have ever seen of her—a picture taken some years before I had ever seen her. Soft curls, iron-gray in color, drooped over the fair, pale cheeks, seeming to subdue by their shadow the flashing light of her beautiful eyes, and to soften the severity of the broad white brow. The face was sweet, calm, and queenlike, expressive of intelligence, dignity, and tenderness —the ideal type of the face of intellectual womanhood. In speaking, all the force and fire of her enthusiastic nature seemed to flash up from the still depths of her mind, and so electrified her hearers as to make them forget the slight lisp in her speech, and the foreign accent and pronunciation, or to remember them only as additional charms. No young girl in all the tender grace which youth and Nature give, or tricked out in all the dainty adornment which art bestows, was ever more lovely in my eyes than Mrs. Rose, in the beautiful ripeness of life’s autumn.