om the shelf, you got an impression of a physique in
perfect because unconscious harmony with its environment. If, on the
contrary, you watched but so much as the nervous, uncertain hand of the
other woman, you would know here was one who had spent her years in
alternately grasping the nettle and letting it go--reaping only stings
in life's fair fields. Easy for any one seeing her in these days (though
she wasn't thirty-six) to share Mrs. Freddy's incredulous astonishment
at hearing from Haycroft the night before that Janet Levering had been
'the beauty of her family.' Mrs. Freddy's answer had been, 'Oh, don't
make fun of her!' and Haycroft had had to assure her of his seriousness,
while the little hostess still stared uncertain.

'The _lines_ of her face are rather good,' she admitted. 'Oh, but those
yellow and pink eyes, and her general muddiness!'

'Yes, yes,' Sir William had agreed. 'She's changed so that I would never
have known her, but her colouring used to be her strong point. I assure
you she was magnificent--oh, much more striking than the younger
sister!'

The bloodless-looking woman who sat uneasily at her own board clutching
at a thin fragment of cold dry toast that hung cheerlessly awry in the
silver rack, like the last brown leaf to a frosty tree, while she
crunched the toast, spoke dryly of the poor; of how 'interesting many of
them are;' how when you take the trouble to understand them, you no
longer lump them all together in a featureless misery, you realize how
significant and varied are their lives.

'Not half as significant and varied as their smells,' said her
unchastened sister.

'Oh, you sometimes talk as if you had no heart!'

'The trouble is, I have no stomach. When you've lured me into one of
those dingy alleys and that all-pervading greasy smell of poverty comes
flooding into my face--well, simply all my most uncharitable feelings
rise up in revolt. I want to hold my nose and hide my eyes, and call for
the motor-car. Running away isn't fast enough,' she said, with energy
and a sudden spark in her golden-brown eye.

Mrs. Fox-Moore poised the fat silver jug over her own belated cup, and
waited for the thick cream to come out in a slow and grudging gobbet
with a heavy plump into the coffee. As she waited, she gently rebuked
that fastidiousness in her companion that shrank from contact with the
unsavoury and the unfortunate.

'It isn't only my fastidiousness, as you call it, that is offe