In honest truth, this Lady Laura Armstrong was a kindly disposed,
sympathetic woman, anxious to make the best of the opportunities which
Providence had given her with so lavish a hand, and to do her duty towards
her less fortunate neighbours. The office of Lady Bountiful, the position
of patroness, suited her humour. Her active frivolous nature, which spurned
repose, and yet never rose above trifles, found an agreeable occupation in
the exercise of this kind of benign influence upon other people's lives.
Whether she would have put herself seriously out of the way for the benefit
of any of these people to whom she was so unfailingly beneficent, was a
question which circumstances had never yet put to the test. Her benevolence
had so far been of a light, airy kind, which did not heavily tax her bodily
or mental powers, or even the ample resources of her purse.
She was a handsome woman, after a fair, florid, rather redundant style
of beauty, and was profoundly skilled in all those arts of costume and
decoration by which such beauty is improved. A woman of middle height, with
a fine figure, a wealth of fair hair, and an aquiline nose of the true
patrician type, her admirers said. The mouth was rather large, but redeemed
by a set of flashing teeth and a winning smile; the chin inclined to be of
that order called "double;" and indeed a tendency to increasing stoutness
was one of the few cares which shadowed Lady Laura's path.
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