e isn't _dressed_ at all,
is she? She is just--protected by her clothes."

Hillyard laughed and Millicent Splay sighed. "And I did hope she would
have got over it all by Goodwood. But no! Really I could slap her. But I
might have known! Joan never does things by halves."

"She seems thorough," said Hillyard, although he remembered, with some
doubts as to the truth of his comment, moments now and again when more
primitive impulses had bubbled up in Joan Whitworth.

"Thorough! Yes, that's the word. Oh, Mr. Hillyard, there was a time when
she really dressed--_dressed_, you understand. My word, she was thorough
then, too. I remember coming out of the Albert Hall on a Melba
afternoon, when we could get nothing but a hansom cab, and a policeman
actually had to lift her up into it like a big baby because her skirt
was so tight. And look at her now!"

Millicent Splay thumped the side of the car in her vexation.

"But you mustn't think she's a fool." Lady Splay turned menacingly on
the silent Hillyard.

"But I don't," he protested.

"That's the last thing to say about her."

"I never said it," declared Martin Hillyard.

"I should have lost my faith in you, if you had," rejoined Millicent
Splay, even now hardly mollified.

But she could not avoid the subject. Here was a new-comer to Rackham
Park. She could not bear that he should carry away a wrong impression of
her darling.

"I'll tell you the truth about Joan. She has lived her sheltered life
with us, and no real things have yet come near her. No real troubles, no
deep joys. Her parents even died when she was too young to know them.
But she is eighteen and alive to her finger-tips. Therefore
she's--expectant."

"Yes," Hillyard agreed.

"She is searching for the meaning, for the secrets of life, sure that
there is a meaning, sure that there are secrets, if only she could get
hold of them. But she hasn't got hold of them. She runs here. She runs
there. She explores, she experiments. That's why she's dressed like a
tramp and thinking out a book where the heroine gets married to the
Funeral March of a Marionette. Oh, my dear person, it just means, as it
always means with us poor creatures, that the right man hasn't come
along."

Millie Splay leaned back in her seat.

"When he does!" she cried. "When he does! Did you see the magnolia this
morning? It burst into flower during the night. Joan! I thought once
that it might be Harold Jupp. But it isn't."

Lady Spla