The Abbess of Quedlimburgh was then twenty-eight or thirty years of age. She had been beautiful as an angel, and yet was when seen by candlelight at a distance. When she was close to her, however, Porporina was amazed to find her face wrinkled and covered with blotches. Her blue eyes, which had been beautiful as possible, now had a red rim around them, like those of a person who had been weeping, and had an evil glare and deep transparency, not calculated to inspire confidence. She had been adored by her family and by all the court, and for a long time had been the most affable, the most joyous and benevolent king's daughter ever described in the romances of royal personages, of the old patrician literature. During the few last years, however, her character had changed as much as her person had. She had attacks of ill-humor, and even something worse, which made her like Frederick in his worst point of view; without seeking to resemble him, and even while in secret she criticised him severely, she was irresistibly led to contract all the faults she censured in him, and to become an imperious and absolute mistress, a skeptical, bitter, learned and disdainful person. Yet, amid these fearful characteristics, which every day look fatal possession of her, there was yet seen to pierce a native kindness, a correct mind, a courageous soul, and passionate heart. What then was passing in the mind of this unfortunate princess? A terrible cause of suffering devoured her, which she was yet forced to conceal in her heart, and which she hid from the eyes of the curious, malicious, or careless world, under the disguise of a stoical and joyous bearing. By means, therefore, of dissimulation and constraint, she had unfolded in herself two different beings, one which she dared reveal to scarcely any one, and the other which she exhibited with a kind of hatred and despair. All observed that in conversation she was become more keen and animated: this uneasy and forced gaiety, though, was painful to the observer, and its icy and chilling effect cannot be described. Successively excited, almost to puerility, and stern even to cruelty, she astonished both others and herself. Torrents of tears extinguished the fire of her anger, and then a savage irony, an impious disdain, snatched her from those moments of salutary depression, she was permitted neither to feel nor to know.