Sealed Lips — page 41: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SEALED LIPS. 33 course, on her own account, and in this interesting sport she had had less good luck than tact. She was a Roumanian by birth, of a very poor but ‘honorable family. She was considered at eighteen to be the village beauty, which was not saying a great deal for her companions. She really had beautiful eyes, those large eyes in which one could see wavering, according to the situation, curi- osity, innocence, or vice. A trifle would give them effrontery or insolence. But save on rare occasions the one that was called the “pretty Martscha” knew how to avoid these trifles and keep her inno- cence, at least as far as looks were concerned. Her cheeks were too sunken, she was too tall and her bust too high to be gracefulin the eyes of acon- noisseur; but what completed her despair, for she knew as well as anybodv the strength and the weakness of her moral and physical beauty, was her German mouth, a mouth which suppressed in this woman the greatest of all feminine charms— the smile. Instead of opening it, after the fashion of a flower, this mouth contracted, covering the teeth and gums, a venial fault in youth, but a mor- tal sin later. | Martscha never knew her father, who died when she was several months old. Her mother had a de- voted heart but a weak mind, and succumbed to grief on discovering that her daugher was ignorant of all affection, justice, or morals when she wished to accomplish her end. These tendencies, essen- GOmichboo KS