g bandages, otherwise--And there for the time being
the matter rested.

The depth of what was unusual in Hilda's relation with Alicia
Livingstone--perhaps it has been plain that they were not quite
the ordinary feminine liens--seems to me to be sounded in the tacit
acceptance of Hilda's novitiate on its merits that fell between the two
women. The full understanding of it was an abyss between them, across
which they joined hands, looking elsewhere. Even in the surprise of
Hilda's announcement Alicia had the instinct to glance away, lest her
eyes should betray too many facts that bore upon the situation. It
had never been discussed, but it had to be accepted, and occasionally
referred to; and the terms of acceptance and reference made no
implication of Stephen Arnold. In her inmost privacy Alicia gazed
breathless at the conception as a whole; she leaped at it, and caught it
and held it to look, with a feverish comparison of possibilities. It
was not strange, perhaps, that she took a vivid personal interest in the
essentials that enabled one to execute a flank movement like Hilda's,
not that she should conceive the first of them to be that one must
come out of a cab. She dismissed that impression with indignation as
ungenerously cynical, but it always came back for redismissal. It did
not interfere in the least, however, with her deliberate invitations to
Stephen to come to Ten, Middleton Street, on afternoons or evenings
when Hilda was there. She was like one standing denied in the Street of
Abundance; she had an avidity of the eye for even love's reflection.

That was a little later. At first there was the transformation to
lament, the loss, the break.

"You look," cried Miss Livingstone, the first time Hilda arrived in the
dress of the novice, a kind of under-study of the Sisters' black and
white, "you look like a person in a book, full of salient points, and
yet made so simple to the reader. If you go on wearing those things I
shall end by understanding you perfectly."

"If you don't understand me," Hilda said, dropping into the corner of
a sofa, "Cela que je m'en doute, it's because you look for too
much elaboration. I am a simple creature, done with rather a broad
brush--voila tout!"

Nevertheless, Miss Livingstone's was a happy impression. The neutrality
of her hospital dress left Hilda in a manner exposed: one saw in
a special way the significance of lines and curves; it was an
astonishingly vigorous human ex