Teresa was a perfect
Spanish lady, as well as a mother in Israel, and no one who ever
conversed with her could for a moment fail to observe that the oldest and
best blood of Spain mantled in her cheek and shone in her eye. A lion
encompassed by crosses was one of the quarters of her father's coat of
arms. And Teresa took that up and added out of it a new glory to all her
father's hereditary honours. For his daughter was all her days a lioness
palisaded round with crosses, till by means of them she was transformed
into a lamb. But, all the time, the lioness was still lurking there.
Teresa's was one of those sovereign souls that are born from time to time
as if to show us what our race was created for at first, and for what it
is still destined. She was a queen among women. She was in intellect
the complete equal, and in still better things than intellect far the
superior, of Isabella and Elizabeth themselves. As she says in an
outspoken autobiographic passage, hers was one of those outstanding and
towering souls on which a thousand eyes and tongues are continually set
without any one understanding them or comprehending them.
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