ter by chance, a week or two later, on the steps of
the National Gallery with another girl, she flushed, bowed, and passed me
quickly. That was natural enough, after our last interview.

Queer, that those two girls should be sisters. They were an interesting
study to me. Clare, shallow, credulous, weak in the intelligence,
conventional, emotional, sensitive, of the eternal type of orthodox and
timid woman, with profound powers of passion, and that touch of
melodrama, that sense of a situation, which might lead her along strange
paths.... And Jane, level-headed, clear-brained, hard, calm,
straight-thinking, cynical, an egotist to her finger-tips, knowing what
she wanted and going for it, tough in the conscience, and ignorant of
love except in its crudest form of desire for the people and things which
ministered to her personal happiness....

It struck me that the two represented two sides of Potterism--the
intellectual and moral. Clare, the ignorant, muddle-headed
sentimentalist; Jane, reacting against this, but on her part grabbing and
exploiting. Their attitude towards truth (that bugbear of Potterism) was
typical; Clare couldn't see it; Jane saw it perfectly clearly, and would
reject it without hesitation if it suited her book. Clare was like her
mother, only with better, simpler stuff in her; Jane was rather like her
father in her shrewd native wit, only, while he was vulgar in his mind,
she was only vulgar in her soul.

Of one thing I was sure: they would both be, on the whole, satisfied with
life, Jane because she would get what she wanted, Clare because she would
be content with little. Clare would inevitably marry; as inevitably, she
would love her husband and her children, and come to regard her passion
for Oliver Hobart and its tragic sequel as a romantic episode of
girlhood, a sort of sowing of wild oats before the real business of life
began. And Jane would, I presumed, ultimately marry Gideon, who was too
good for her, altogether too fine and too good. For Gideon was direct and
keen and passionate, and loved and hated cleanly, and thought finely and
acutely. Gideon wasn't greedy; he took life and its pleasures and
triumphs and amusements in his stride, as part of the day's work; he
didn't seek them out for their own sakes. Gideon lived for causes and
beliefs and ideals. He was temperamentally Christian, though he didn't
happen to believe Christian dogma. He had his alloy, like other people,
of ambition and