t altogether. That in itself, for
an observer deeply versed in this lady, was attaching and beguiling.
Another indication was that he found himself, in spite of such a break
in the chain, distinctly predisposed to Nanda. "If she reproduces then
so vividly Lady Julia," the young man threw out, "why does she strike
you as so much less pretty than her foreign friend there, who is after
all by no means a prodigy?"

The subject of this address, with one of the photographs in his hand,
glanced, while he reflected, at the other. Then with a subtlety that
matched itself for the moment with Vanderbank's: "You just told me
yourself that the little foreign person--"

"Is ever so much the lovelier of the two? So I did. But you've promptly
recognised it. It's the first time," Vanderbank went on, to let him
down more gently, "that I've heard Mrs. Brookenham admit the girl's good
looks."

"Her own girl's? 'Admit' them?"

"I mean grant them to be even as good as they are. I myself, I must
tell you, extremely like Nanda's appearance. I think Lady Julia's
granddaughter has in her face, in spite of everything--!"

"What do you mean by everything?" Mr. Longdon broke in with such an
approach to resentment that his host's gaiety overflowed.

"You'll see--when you do see. She has no features. No, not one,"
Vanderbank inexorably pursued; "unless indeed you put it that she has
two or three too many. What I was going to say was that she has in
her expression all that's charming in her nature. But beauty, in
London"--and feeling that he held his visitor's attention he gave
himself the pleasure of freely presenting his idea--"staring glaring
obvious knock-down beauty, as plain as a poster on a wall, an
advertisement of soap or whiskey, something that speaks to the crowd
and crosses the footlights, fetches such a price in the market that
the absence of it, for a woman with a girl to marry, inspires endless
terrors and constitutes for the wretched pair (to speak of mother and
daughter alone) a sort of social bankruptcy. London doesn't love the
latent or the lurking, has neither time nor taste nor sense for anything
less discernible than the red flag in front of the steam-roller. It
wants cash over the counter and letters ten feet high. Therefore you see
it's all as yet rather a dark question for poor Nanda--a question that
in a way quite occupies the foreground of her mother's earnest little
life. How WILL she look, what will be thought of he