visibly absorbed in the charming
figure-piece submitted to them. I was freshly struck with the fact that
this meagre and defective little person, with the cock of her hat
and the flutter of her crape, with her eternal idleness, her
eternal happiness, her absence of moods and mysteries and the pretty
presentation of her feet, which especially now in the supported slope
of her posture occupied with their imperceptibility so much of the
foreground--I was reminded anew, I say, how our young lady dazzled by
some art that the enumeration of her merits didn't explain and that
the mention of her lapses didn't affect. Where she was amiss nothing
counted, and where she was right everything did. I say she was wanting
in mystery, but that after all was her secret. This happened to be my
first chance of introducing her to my mother, who had not much left in
life but the quiet look from under the hood of her chair at the things
which, when she should have quitted those she loved, she could still
trust to make the world good for them. I wondered an instant how much
she might be moved to trust Flora Saunt, and then while the chair stood
still and she waited I went over and asked the girl to come and speak
to her. In this way I saw that if one of Flora's attendants was the
inevitable young Hammond Synge, master of ceremonies of her regular
court, always offering the use of a telescope and accepting that of a
cigar, the other was a personage I had not yet encountered, a small pale
youth in showy knickerbockers, whose eyebrows and nose and the glued
points of whose little moustache were extraordinarily uplifted and
sustained. I remember taking him at first for a foreigner and for
something of a pretender: I scarcely know why, unless because of the
motive I felt in the stare he fixed on me when I asked Miss Saunt to
come away. He struck me a little as a young man practising the social
art of "impertinence"; but it didn't matter, for Flora came away with
alacrity, bringing all her prettiness and pleasure and gliding over the
grass in that rustle of delicate mourning which made the endless variety
of her garments, as a painter could take heed, strike one always as the
same obscure elegance. She seated herself on the floor of my mother's
chair, a little too much on her right instep as I afterwards gathered,
caressing her stiff hand, smiling up into her cold face, commending
and approving her without a reserve and without a doubt. She told her