It
was on the prior conviction, literally, that she had developed her
admirable dress, instinctively felicitous, always either black or white
and a matter of rather severe squareness and studied line. She was
magnificently neat; everything she showed had a way of looking both old
and fresh; and there was on every occasion the same picture in her draped
head--draped in low-falling black--and the fine white plaits (of a
painter's white, somehow) disposed on her chest. What had happened was
that these arrangements, determined by certain considerations, lent
themselves in effect much better to certain others. Adopted in mere shy
silence they had really only deepened her accent. It was singular,
moreover, that, so constituted, there was nothing in her aspect of the
ascetic or the nun. She was a good hard sixteenth-century figure, not
withered with innocence, bleached rather by life in the open. She was in
short just what we had made of her, a Holbein for a great Museum; and our
position, Mrs. Munden's and mine, rapidly became that of persons having
such a treasure to dispose of. The world--I speak of course mainly of
the art-world--flocked to see it.

CHAPTER IV

"But has she any idea herself, poor thing?" was the way I had put it to
Mrs. Munden on our next meeting after the incident at my studio; with the
effect, however, only of leaving my friend at first to take me as
alluding to Mrs. Brash's possible prevision of the chatter she might
create. I had my own sense of that--this provision had been nil; the
question was of her consciousness of the office for which Lady Beldonald
had counted on her and for which we were so promptly proceeding to spoil
her altogether.

"Oh I think she arrived with a goodish notion," Mrs. Munden had replied
when I had explained; "for she's clever too, you know, as well as good-
looking, and I don't see how, if she ever really _knew_ Nina, she could
have supposed for a moment that she wasn't wanted for whatever she might
have left to give up. Hasn't she moreover always been made to feel that
she's ugly enough for anything?" It was even at this point already
wonderful how my friend had mastered the case and what lights, alike for
its past and its future, she was prepared to throw on it. "If she has
seen herself as ugly enough for anything she has seen herself--and that
was the only way--as ugly enough for Nina; and she has had her own manner
of showing that she understands