rately laid herself out to
talk well. She looked in the glass sometimes at a little
vertical line that seemed to be coming at the corners of
her mouth, and wondered whether at twenty-four one might
expect the first indication of approaching old-maidenhood.
When she was paler than usual she reflected that the
season was taking a good deal out of her. She was bravely
and rigidly commonplace with Kendal, who told her that
she ought to drop it and go out of town--she was not
looking well. She drew closer to her father, and at the
same time armed her secret against him at all points.
Janet would have had any one know rather than he. She
felt that it implied almost a breach of faith, of
comradeship, to say nothing of the complication of her
dignity, which she wanted upheld in his eyes before all
others. In reality she made him more the sovereign of
her affections and the censor of her relations than nature
designed Lawrence Cardiff to be in the parental connection.
It gave him great pleasure that he could make his daughter
a friend, and accord her the independence of a friend;
it was a satisfaction to him that she was not obtrusively
filial. Her feeling for Kendal, under the circumstances,
would have hurt him if he bad known of it, but only
through his sympathy and his affection--he was unacquainted
with the jealousy of a father. But in Janet's eyes they
made their little world together, indispensable to each
other as its imaginary hemispheres. She had a quiet pain,
in the infrequent moments when she allowed herself the
full realization of her love for Kendal, in the knowledge
that she, of her own motion, had disturbed its unities
and its ascendancies.

Since that evening at Lady Halifax's, when Janet saw John
Kendal reddening so unaccountably, she had felt singularly
more tolerant of Elfrida's theories. She combated them
as vigorously as ever, but she lost her dislike to
discussing them. As it became more and more obvious that
Kendal found in Elfrida a reward for the considerable
amount of time he spent in her society, so Janet arrived
at the point of encouraging her heresies, especially with
their personal application. She took secret comfort in
them; she hoped they would not change, and she was too
honest to disguise to herself the reason. If Elfrida
cared for him, Janet assured herself, the case would be
entirely different--she would stamp out her own feeling
without mercy, to the tiniest spark. She would be glad,