Rose, Blanche, and Violet, Volume I by George Henry Lewes

Messire Bon l'a prise en mariage, / Quoiqu'il n'ait plus que quatre cheveux gris; / Mais comme il est le premier du pays / Son bien supplée au défaut de son age. / LAFONTAINE.

My heroines have grown up into young women since we last saw them idling on the sands; and it is proper I should at once give some idea of their appearance. Rose and Blanche, children by the first wife, are very unlike their sister Violet, the only child of the second Mrs. Vyner: they are fair as Englishwomen only are fair; she is dark as the children of the south are dark. They are plump and middle-sized; she is thin and very tall. They are settling into rounded womanhood; she is at that undeveloped "awkward age" when the beauty of womanhood has not yet come to fill the place of the vanished grace of childhood.