He is better than the prince." "My dear, my dear!" repeated the mother in deprecating accents, but with a significant glance at Rowland which seemed to bespeak his attention to the glory of possessing a daughter who could deal in that fashion with the aristocracy.
Rowland remembered that when their unknown visitors had passed before them, a year previous, in the Villa Ludovisi, Roderick and he had exchanged conjectures as to their nationality and social quality.
Roderick had declared that they were old-world people; but Rowland now needed no telling to feel that he might claim the elder lady as a fellow-countrywoman.

She was a person of what is called a great deal of presence, with the faded traces, artfully revived here and there, of once brilliant beauty.

Her daughter had come lawfully by her loveliness, but Rowland mentally made the distinction that the mother was silly and that the daughter was not.

The mother had a very silly mouth--a mouth, Rowland suspected, capable of expressing an inordinate degree of unreason.

The young girl, in spite of her childish satisfaction in her poodle, was not a person of feeble understanding.