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When Anne Percy smiled her mouth looked ripe and eager for pleasure, her eyes sparkled with youth and gaiety, but when shy or thoughtful or impatient her mouth was too large and closely set, her low thick brows made her eyes look sullen and opaque, their blue too dark even for beauty. It was a day when "pencilled" eyebrows inspired the sonnet, when mouths were rosebuds, or should be for fashion's sake, when forms were slight and languid, and a freckle was a blemish on the pink and white complexions of England's high-born maidens. Anne was tanned by the winds of moor and sea, she had a superb majestic figure, and strode when she took her exercise in a thoroughly unladylike manner. She had not an attribute, not even an affectation, in common with the beauties of Bath House; and the reigning novelists of the day, Disraeli, Bulwer, Dickens, Lady Blessington, Mrs. Norton, would never have modelled a heroine of romance on her.
There were plenty of fine women in England even then, but they were not in fashion, and when fate took them to court they soon learned to reduce their proportions, mince their gait, and bleach their complexions.