She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,
A smile of hers was like an act of grace;
She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,
Like daily beauties of the vulgar race;
But, if she smiled, a light was on her face,
A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam
Of peaceful radiance.
—Hartley Coleridge.
To the surprise of both the friends, Anna, who had gone about her rigorous tasks unseen and unnoted hitherto, began about this time to come into a certain comparative prominence in the quiet little city.
A day or two after the evening described in the last chapter, Anna received a note from Mrs. Ingraham, the wife of a distinguished citizen of the town, a man of great wealth, and a well-known senator. The Ingrahams were, perhaps, the most highly placed family in the little town, by right of distinguished antecedents, of wealth, and of habit of life. They belonged to that singularly privileged class, which Anna Mallison had not hitherto encountered, who have both will and power to appropriate the most select of all things which minister to the individual development, whether things material, things intellectual, or things spiritual. Thus Mrs. Ingraham and her daughters were women of fashion, prominent figures at the state functions of their own state, and well known in the inner circles of Washington society. They dressed superlatively well in clothes that came from Paris. At the same time they were as much at home among literary as among fashionable folk, and Mrs. Ingraham at least was understood to be devotedly religious, with an especial penchant for foreign missions. In fine, all things were theirs.