I am very anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand.

There are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing organs.

When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery, carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.
"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry.

Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the riotous tumult of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the features;--and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.

She carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious, steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not spill.