The newcomer sat in profile to Althea, her back to the room, facing the
open window, out of which she gazed vaguely and unseeingly. She was
dressed in black, a thin dress, rather frayed along the edges--an
evening dress; though, as a concession to Continental custom, she had a
wide black scarf over her bare shoulders. She sat, leaning forward, her
elbows on the table, and once, when she glanced round and found Althea's
eyes fixed on her, she looked back for a moment, but with something of
the same vagueness and unseeingness with which she looked out of the
window.

She was very odd. An enemy might say that she had Chinese eyes
and a beak-like nose. The beak was small, as were all the
features--delicately, decisively placed in the pale, narrow face--yet it
jutted over prominently, and the long eyes were updrawn at the outer
corners and only opened widely with an effect of effort. She had
quantities of hair, dense and dark, arranged with an ordered
carelessness, and widely framing her face and throat. She was very
thin, and she seemed very tired; and fatigue, which made Althea look
wistful, made this young lady look bored and bitter. Her grey eyes,
perhaps it was the strangeness of their straight-drawn upper lids, were
dazed and dim in expression. She ate little, leaned limply on her
elbows, and sometimes rubbed her hands over her face, and sat so, her
fingers in her hair, for a languid moment. Dinner was only half over
when she rose and went away, her black dress trailing behind her, and a
moon-like space of neck visible between her heavily-clustered hair and
the gauze scarf.

Althea could not have said why, but for the rest of the meal, and after
she had gone back to her sitting-room, the thought of the young lady in
black remained almost oppressively with her.

She had felt empty and aimless before seeing her; since seeing her she
felt more empty, more aimless than ever. It was an absurd impression,
and she tried to shake it off with the help of a recent volume of
literary criticism, but it coloured her mind as though a drop of some
potent chemical had been tipped into her uncomfortable yet indefinable
mood, and had suddenly made visible in it all sorts of latent elements.

It was curious to feel, as a deep conviction about a perfect stranger,
that though the young lady in black might often know moods, they would
never be undefined ones; to be sure that, however little she had, she
would always accurately know wha