The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale.  She was lady-like, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by delicate, evanescent, and indesribable grace, which was now recognized as its indication.  Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disatrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to percieve how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped.  It may be true, that, to a sensitive observer, there was something exquisitely painful in it.  But the point whcih drew all eye, and, as it were, transfigurerd the wearer,--so that both men and women, who had been familiarly acquianted with her, were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time.  It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and inclosing her in a sphere by herself.
                                                                                                         -- Nathaniel Hawthorne