without mass. Slender and simple, frequently
soundless, she was somehow always in the line of
the eye she counted singularly for its pleasure.
More " dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than
other women, or less dressed, should occasion re
quire, with more, she probably could not have given
the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of
which her friends were conscious those friends
whose general explanation was to say that she was
clever, whether or no it were taken by the world as
the cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw
more things than her fine face in the dull glass of
her father's lodgings, she might have seen that, after
all, she was not herself a fact in the collapse. She
didn't judge herself cheap, she didn't make for
misery. Personally, at least, she was not chalk-
marked for the auction. She hadn't given up yet,
and the broken sentence, if she was the last word,
would end with a sort of meaning. There was a
minute during which, though her eyes were fixed,
she quite visibly lost herself in the thought of the
way she might still pull things round had she only
been a man. It was the name, above all, she would
take in hand the precious name she so liked and
that, in spite of the harm her wretched father had
done it, was not yet past praying for. She loved it
in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound.
But what could a penniless girl do with it but let
it go?

When her father at last appeared she became, as

[[6]]

p005 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p006w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p007

v?