nd of something, and perhaps it was
his only weakness. What did Robert think?

Robert did not hear her. He was bending forward, looking beyond her,
across the room toward the great doors. They had swung open again, with
a flash of their glass panels, to give passage to a lady.

She came slowly, with the irresistible motion of creatures that divide
and trouble the medium in which they move. The white, painted wainscot
behind her showed her small, eager head, its waving rolls and crowning
heights of hair, black as her gown. She had a sweet face, curiously
foreshortened by a low forehead and the briefest of chins. It was white
with the same whiteness as her neck, her shoulders, her arms--a
whiteness pure and profound. This face she kept thrust a little forward,
while her eyes looked round, steadily, deliberately, for the place where
she desired to be. She carried on her arm a long tippet of brown fur. It
slipped, and her effort to recover it brought her to a standstill.

The large, white room, half empty at this season, gave her up bodily to
what seemed to Lucy the intolerable impudence of the public gaze.

She was followed by an older lady who had the air of making her way with
difficulty and vexation through an unpleasantly crowded space. This lady
was somewhat oddly attired in a white dress cut high with a Puritan
intention, but otherwise indiscreetly youthful. She kept close to the
tail of her companion's gown, and tracked its charming evolutions with
an irritated eye. Her whole aspect was evidently a protest against the
publicity she was compelled to share.

[Illustration: "She stood there, strangely still ... before the pitiless
stare that went up to her appealing face."]

Lucy was not interested in her. He was watching the lady in black who
was now standing in the middle of the room. Her elbow touched the
shoulder of a young man on her left. The fur tippet slipped again and
lay at the young man's feet. He picked it up, and as he handed it to her
he stared into her face, and sleeked his little moustache above a
furtive, objectionable smile. His companion (Jane's uninteresting man),
roused from communion with the spirit of Veuve Cliquot, fixed on the
lady a pair of blood-shot eyes in a brutal, wine-dark face.

She stood there, strangely still, it seemed to Lucy, before the pitiless
stare that went up, right and left, to her appealing face. She was
looking, it seemed to him, for her refuge.

She moved forward.