amily; or, if she did not, Hester understood that her married
sisters and sisters-in-law devoted, with success, a great deal of time
which they did not value in other respects, to the subject in question.

Speak of Rose Millar's professional notions as to the human figure being
left easy and untrammelled! Rose was a pattern of decorous neatness and
trimness compared to Hester; indeed, Rose was appalled by the total
absence of order and ceremony, not to say of embellishment, in her
friend's toilet. Hester abandoned herself permanently to deshabilles.
She appeared in a jacket indoors as well as out. She dispensed with
collars in morning and lace in evening wear. She did her hair once when
she got up, and regarded passing her hand over her head when she took
off her hat as all that was incumbent upon her afterwards. Without
intending it, and without dreaming of copying the bushes of hair in
Rossetti's pictures, Hester Jennings's sandy-coloured locks, not a good
point in her personal appearance, were, as her great-grandmother would
have cried in horror, more like a dish-mop than anything else. She
stopped short of dirt in her slovenliness because of her purity of soul,
her deep respect for the laws of health, and because of the traditions
of her class, from which she could not altogether escape. But between
her bondage to work, and her scornful neglect of other claims which she
had known over-exalted and exaggerated, she had accomplished marvels.

Hester Jennings had attained such eminence in her recklessness of
consequences, that, in place of being a nearly lovely woman, in
accordance with her profile, complexion, and glorious eyes, she was
barely good-looking because of them, in a style which repulsed many more
people than it attracted others. The sight of Hester was one of the
numerous lessons which she was destined to give to Rose Millar. It
frightened Rose into becoming tamely conventional and elaborately tidy
in dress, to the surprise and edification of her sister Annie, for it
was just at the time when Annie was most spent by her new life and
labours, and least inclined to put off her hospital gown and cap.

CHAPTER XII.

A YOUNG ARTIST'S EXPERIENCE.

Rose respected Hester Jennings. She could not help respecting her--a
creature so much in earnest, so indefatigably industrious, so
indifferent to all the distractions of the outer world which might have
taken her out of herself and away from her work, while