''The Merchant of Venice'' heroine

Usage examples of portia.

He had reached the Academy a little before Portia, and had watched her unobserved as she mounted the steps.

For ever after they seemed to blend themselves with the vision of Portia in her summer dress, as she listened to the heart-searching music with her eyes down, so completely under the spell that, when she raised them at the close, there were unconscious tears quivering on the lashes.

Still, the fact remains that Portia and her admirer said nothing that might not have been taken down by a shorthand reporter and printed in a manual for daily use in crowded drawing-rooms.

He laughed so genuinely and with such thorough enjoyment that Portia, somewhat abashed, laughed too.

Waratah Lodge, whereby the Kensington abode of Wilmer James, standing in its own quarter of an acre of garden, was known, Portia found there would be only time to get into later-day trim before luncheon.

A white, pagoda-shaped cage, containing two budgery-guards, that Portia had brought all the way from her bush-home--a cage large enough to allow the love-sick Hebraic-looking little birds to play at pursuing each other through space after a period of unlimited fondling--stood upon a table near the window.

This, indeed, was the normal aspect it presented, for Portia found it easier to scribble off her correspondence at an unassuming white--enamel-painted table, whereon her buvard, in old-stamped leather, found its resting-place.

James had explained that no one who was not adelig was allowed to become an inmate of the establishment, and Portia had noticed that a coronet was insinuated into all the crochet-worked antimacassars that encumbered the sad-looking reception-room.

Under the influence of a flood of similar reflections, Portia slowly turned the handle of the library door, and entered, as one walking in her sleep, into the presence of John Morrisson.

Against this supposition, however, there is more than one argument to be advanced, of which I will only mention those that had most weight with Portia herself.

Not that Portia thought very much of this accredited warrant of a sole and exclusive passion.

He did not speak for an instant, but his lips continued to work with the tasting movement Portia knew so well.

In the process of looking he had bent his head upon his chest, and Portia could see that the blood had mounted to his temples in a warm red flame.

Suffice it to say, there is a difference, and Portia was never more sensible of it than when she returned, as on the present occasion, from moving among a London society crowd, into the Anglo-Australian social atmosphere of the Kensington house.

Where such manifestations spring from a one-sided sentiment, as was the case, I fear, with John and Portia, they are apt to be more terrifying than reassuring to the non--or wrong-sided one.