She might certainly have made her way as an actress, had
fortune called upon her to earn her bread in that fashion. And her voice
would have suited the stage. It was powerful when she called upon it for
power; but, at the same time, flexible and capable of much pretence at
feeling. She could bring it to a whisper that would almost melt your heart
with tenderness, as she had melted Sir Florian's, when she sat near to him
reading poetry; and then she could raise it to a pitch of indignant wrath
befitting a Lady Macbeth when her husband ventured to rebuke her. And her
ear was quite correct in modulating these tones. She knew--and it must
have been by instinct, for her culture in such matters was small--how to
use her voice so that neither its tenderness nor its wrath should be
misapplied. There were pieces in verse that she could read, things not
wondrously good in themselves, so that she would ravish you; and she would
so look at you as she did it that you would hardly dare either to avert
your eyes or to return her gaze. Sir Florian had not known whether to do
the one thing or the other, and had therefore seized her in his arms.
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