looked flat and stale beside her, beside the flash of
her white arms, the gleam of her hair, the confident grace of every
movement. He thought her much too self-conscious and self-satisfied; and
she certainly did not make herself agreeable to him; but for all that he
could hardly take his eyes off her; and it occurred to him once or twice
to envy Robert the easy childish friendliness she showed to him, and to
him alone of the party. The lack of real sympathy between her and
Catherine was evident to the stranger at once--what, indeed, could the
two have in common? He saw that Catherine was constantly on the point of
blaming, and Rose constantly on the point of rebelling. He caught the
wrinkling of Catherine's brow as Rose presently, in emulation apparently
of some acquaintances she had been making in London, let slip the names
of some of her male friends without the 'Mr.,' or launched into some
bolder affectation than usual of a comprehensive knowledge of London
society. The girl, in spite of all her beauty, and her fashion, and the
little studied details of her dress, was in reality so crude, so much of
a child under it all, that it made her audacities and assumptions the
more absurd, and he could see that Robert was vastly amused by them.

But Langham was not merely amused by her. She was too beautiful and too
full of character.

It astonished him to find himself afterwards edging over to the corner
where she sat with the rectory cat on her knee--an inferior animal, but
the best substitute for Chattie available. So it was, however; and once
in her neighbourhood he made another serious effort to get her to talk
to him. The Elsmeres had never seen him so conversational. He dropped
his paradoxical melancholy; he roared as gently as any sucking dove; and
Robert, catching from the pessimist of St. Anselm's, as the evening went
on, some hesitating commonplaces worthy of a bashful undergraduate on
the subject of the boats and Commemoration, had to beat a hasty retreat,
so greatly did the situation tickle his sense of humour.

But the tutor made his various ventures under a discouraging sense of
failure. What a capricious ambiguous creature it was, how fearless, how
disagreeably alive to all his own damaging peculiarities! Never had he
been so piqued for years, and as he floundered about trying to find some
common ground where he and she might be at ease, he was conscious
throughout of her mocking indifferent eyes, which seem