A Broken Blossom Vol. 1 of 3 by Florence Marryat

Had I waited a day or two, I should have had no occasion to ask Teresa Lovett if her family formed the English population of St. Pucelle. The news of my arrival spread like wild-fire, and before a week was over my head, I had been introduced to every individual, English or Belgian, in the place. The very first whom I had the pleasure of meeting was Miss Sophia Markham, who ran in-Miss Markham never walked-on the morning following my arrival. As soon as I entered the room I recognised her, from the description given me the night before. She was so wonderfully infantile in dress, manner, and conversation. She was a woman of forty-of forty-five-perhaps even fifty years of age, but she was very well preserved and looked much younger. And this preservation had been accomplished, not by means of cosmetics, but by the lack of them. Miss Markham was wise in her generation. She knew that powder and paint never yet hid wrinkles effectually, and that to dye the hair a different colour from that which nature has bestowed upon it, is to violate one of the first principles of art.

But this fact must not lead one to suppose that she was not intensely vain of her personal appearance, and took any amount of trouble to maintain it. For years past she had never gone to bed without plastering her face with cold cream, in order to keep her skin soft and unwrinkled. Each grey hair, as it made its unwelcome appearance, had been sedulously rooted out, and she spent hours before the looking-glass, brushing and oiling the remainder. She had bestowed equal attention on her teeth and her complexion and her figure, and the result was, that in middle life, though she could not look a girl (as she fondly persisted in thinking that she did), Miss Sophia Markham had certainly contrived to drop at least ten years of her existence. She was a short woman, with a large head, and very small hands and feet, of which she was inordinately vain. She had fine eyes and good teeth; a large nose and a small brain. But, after the fashion of most mortals, she was so shortsighted as to be quite unable to distinguish in what she excelled and in what she did not, and persisted in imagining that her fleshy nose was a pert _retroussé_, and her mind of a ponderous and weighty order, equal in value to that of any of her peers.