clasped about her knees, looking out to sea, and he could swear she
had sat there motionless as the stretch of gray sand about her for an
hour. Such torpidity revolted Neckart. Neither did it appease him that the
nobly-cut, dim-lighted face, the mass of yellowish hair rolling down from
its black band, the coarse brown dress which hung about her in thick
folds, all gave him pleasure. In the moment he had met her first he had
felt an odd repulsion to this girl. The women with whom he had fraternized
were akin to himself: Jane, child as she was, was antagonistic. He felt
for her the same kind of irritated dislike as that which Miss Fleming gave
to her, and which people of active brains are apt to give to any creature
whose animus is totally different from their own.

What did the girl sit there for, thinking her own thoughts? Young women at
her time of life blushed and fluttered and plumed themselves when a man
came near who was of the right age to love and marry. And so they ought,
so they ought! Neckart was used to see women of any age plume themselves
when he was in sight. It was simple admission of his position. They knew
their own capital of beauty or wit, and showed him the best of every
point, just as a pheasant turns every golden feather to the sun when a
passer-by comes near. He liked these radiant, self-asserting women, to be
sure, very much as he did the silly fowl or a Skye terrier conscious of
its beauty in every hair. But beauty was so much wasted material on this
daughter of Swendon's, who did not seem to know she had it.

Besides, Mr. Neckart had always been thrown into contact with women who
had careers and aims. Each one of them wished she had been born a man, and
did what she could to snatch a man's prerogatives. One wrote, another
painted, a third sang; this one strove for political power in the lobbies
of Congress, that for money, the majority for husbands: they were wits,
litterateurs, society women. But for a young girl to jog on from year to
year striving neither for knowledge nor lovers, making her world of the
whims and wants of a weak-minded old man, composedly building up every
day models which she knew would prove failures to-morrow,--here was a most
inane life.

Any eye which had grown used to the flash and flutter of brilliant
tropical birds in a cage would be apt to find the little dull-breasted
swallow sitting motionless by her nest a very insipid subject of study.
Probably no other man, a