Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/86

76 John Bassett could not have told, if he had been asked, whether this girl were fair or not; but now in the more assured composure of his new standpoint of observation, he began to study her features. They were of delicate mold, indicating sensibility rather than strength. Her hair was of so pale a yellow that only its great thickness saved it from looking dead. It was turned back from her low forehead in rippling waves which were too thick to lie flat. Her eyes were of a clear, bright dark blue, and in them shone a sort of restrained energy which gave to her face the strength which the delicate features would otherwise have lacked. It was not a beautiful face. It was very far from a pretty face. But it was a face to arrest one at first sight. As it had arrested John Bassett, it had arrested many a human being, man and woman, before.

But it always came to pass that each human being thus arrested by Fanny Lane's face, very soon forgot all about her face, in a vivid consciousness of her personality. Her individual magnetism was something not to be described, not to be defined. It was to some persons as powerfully repellant as it was to others attracting. There were men and women who had been heard to say that they simply could not stay in the same room with Fanny Lane, so disagreeable to them was her very presence, and there were men and women for whom simply her presence could transform the most cheerless room into a palace of joy and for whom