t have proceeded from
Mrs. Eldred. It was, indeed, one of those small voices that come from
things diminutive and young. It seemed to be trying to tell him that
dinner was ready. He looked round over his shoulder to see what kind of
creature it was that could thus introduce itself without his knowledge.

It was young, young almost to excess. He judged it to be about two- or
three-and-twenty. At his approach it drew as close as possible to the
sideboard. It had the air of cultivating assiduously the art of
self-effacement, for its face, when looked at, achieved an expression of
inimitable remoteness.

He now perceived that the creature was not only young but most adorably
feminine. He smiled, simply to reassure it.

"How on earth did you get in without my hearing you?"

"I was told to be very quiet, sir. And not to speak."

"Well, you have spoken, haven't you?"

She, as it were, seized upon and recovered the smile that darted out to
play reprehensibly about the corners of her mouth.

"I had to," said she.

Soft-footed and soft-tongued, moving like a breath, that was how Rose
Eldred first appeared to George Tanqueray.

He had asked her name, and her name, she said, was Rose.

If you reasoned about Rose, you saw that she had no right to be pretty,
yet she was. Nature had defied reason when she made her, working from
some obscure instinct for roundness; an instinct which would have
achieved perfection in the moulding of Rose's body if Rose had only
grown two inches taller. Not that the purest reason could think of Rose
as dumpy. Her figure, defying nature, passed for perfect. It was her
face that baffled you. It had a round chin that was a shade too large
for it; an absurd little nose with a round end, tilted; grey eyes a
thought too round, and eyebrows too thick by a hair's-breadth. Not a
feature that did not err by a thought, a hair's-breadth or a shade. All
but her mouth, and that was perfect. A small mouth, with lips so soft,
so full, that you could have called it round. It had pathetic corners,
and when she spoke it trembled for very softness. From her mouth upwards
it was as if Rose's face had been first delicately painted, and then as
delicately blurred. Only her chin was left clean and decided.

And as Nature, in making Rose's body, had erred by excess of roundness,
when it came to Rose's hair, she rioted in an iniquitous, an unjust
largesse of vitality. Rose herself seemed aware of the sin of it, she
t