la standing by the window with her back to her family;
the others sat or stood in attitudes averted from her and from each
other.

When they heard me they all stirred and began talking. And as I came into
the room I found the girls drawn together (even Viola had turned from her
window).

I see them now: Canon Thesiger standing on the hearthrug, looking
handsome; and Mrs. Thesiger beside him, looking handsome, too, in grey
silk and a little flushed. I hadn't realized in our first meeting _how_
handsome they both were, and how brilliantly unlike. He was well-built,
slender, aquiline, clean-cut and clean-shaven; he had thin, beautiful
lips that he held in stiffly; he had dark eyes like his son Reggie's, and
dark hair parted correctly in the middle, hair that waved. He had tried
to depress and subdue it by hard brushing with a wet brush, but it
continued to wave in spite of him, and the crests of the waves were
silver, which accentuated them.

Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump. She was fair and
blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features,
with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness. I say mutinous, because
Mrs. Thesiger's way of being handsome was in revolt against her
husband's. Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she
encouraged its waving. This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger's appearance was
frivolous. But it was not. All these florid plumpnesses and the upward
curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger's mouth. Their intentions
were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize
with his. Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity,
the superior _art_ of Mrs. Thesiger.

It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed
that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.

And she was, if anything, braver than her husband. He could only just
smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting
me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) I _didn't_
know.

And they--the four daughters--I'm not sure that they weren't the most
gallant of this gallant family.

I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents' beauty
that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features. Not one of
those five little faces was correct. Victoria's had tried hard for
correctness in her father's manner, but her mother's irrepressible
plumpness had ma