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Her father’s facial expression played over her countenance, manifesting that responsive personal interest which drew many to her. Her mother, as we already know, could express that responsive attitude also, and exercise the personal influence when she chose, but with Adele it was spontaneous, perfectly natural, and her smile sincere, ingenuous, rather than ingenious, one of the most precious and potent gifts a woman can possess.
And some of her other gifts by heredity were also very evident, but modified. Dame Nature had been exceedingly kind, and given her as it were only those elements which intensified the better traits of the previous generations. Her active mind reminded one of her father’s intellectual ability in science, but it was so modified by her mother’s more comprehensive susceptibility and impressionability in many directions, her worldly wisdom and promptness, that in Adele it took a different turn from either one of the parents. Her social instincts could not be suppressed, but fundamentally they tended towards an appreciation and insight of the humanities and ethical subjects rather than the material interests one might look for in the granddaughter of Anthony Gains, or the intellectual abstractions which might have come from the Professor’s mode of thought.