han clothed her, it covered her
up as if she had been a guilty secret; there was concealment and
disguise in every crease of the awful garment. In its imperishable
prudery it refused to define her by ever so innocent a curve; all
its folds were implicated in a conspiracy against her sex. The
effect, though striking, was obviously unstudied and inevitable, and
he argued charitably that Miss Tancred was attired, not after her
own mysterious and perverse fancy, but according to some still more
mysterious and perverse doom. Happily she seemed unconscious of her
appearance, and this unconsciousness had saved her.

For Miss Tancred was plain; and the irritating thing about her
plainness was that it, at any rate, was not inevitable. She had had
a hair's-breadth escape of being handsome in a somewhat original and
eccentric way. And so her plainness was insistent; it would not let
you alone, but forced you to look at it, worrying you with perpetual
suggestions of the beauty it might have been. Her black hair grew
low on the center of her forehead, whence it rose describing a
semicircle above each temple; she had a short and salient Roman
nose, black eyes, and straight black brows laid like an accent on
the jutting eyebones. Her mouth--there might have been hope for her
in her mouth, but for its singular unreadiness to smile; there was
no hope for her in her sallow skin, the dull droop of her eyelids,
her whole insupportable air of secrecy and reserve. A woman has no
business to look like that.

There could be no hope for any woman whom Maurice Durant had
pronounced unsketchable. He was tolerant with the tolerance of a
clever young modern painter, trained to look for beauty (and find
it, too) in the most unlikely places. He could find no beauty in
Miss Tancred. She was useless for his purposes. Those lips had never
learned to flirt, to chatter, to sing, to do anything spontaneous
and natural and pleasing.

He shook hands with her in a paralytic manner, battering his brains
for a reply to her polite commonplaces. Inwardly he was furious. He
felt that he had been duped, tricked, infamously cheated of his
legitimate desire; and he hated the woman as if she, poor soul, had
been personally responsible.

It had bored him to listen to the Colonel, and he was sure it would
bore him still more to talk to Miss Tancred; but for ten minutes he
did his best to sustain a miraculous flow of sparkling monologue. If
Miss Tancred was going t