it isn't," she answered quickly, dropping her voice into
a confidential statement. "It's all wrong. I thought you'd know why as
you've been everywhere. Caroline Smith helped me to choose it, and it
looked all right until I wore it. It's me ... I'm hopeless to fit.
Caroline says so. I don't care about clothes--if only I looked just
like anybody else I'd never bother again--but it's so tiresome to have
taken so much trouble and then for it to be all wrong."

Martin was then aware of many things--that this was a strange unusual
girl, that she reassured him as to her interest, her vitality, her
sincerity as no girl had ever done before, that his sister was aware of
their intimate conversation and that she resented it, and that he must
see this girl again and as soon as possible. He was as liable as any
young man in the world to the most sudden and most violent enthusiasms,
but they had been enthusiasms for a pretty face, for a sensual appeal,
for a sentimental moment. Here there was no prettiness, no sensuality,
no sentiment. There was something so new that he felt like Cortez upon
his peak in Darien.

"It's all right," he reassured her urgently. "It's all right. I promise
you it is. The great thing is to look yourself. And you'll never be the
least like any one else." He meant that to be the first open
declaration of his own particular discovery of her, but he was aware
that his sentence could have more than one interpretation.
Uncomfortably conscious then of his sister's regard of them, he looked
up and said:

"Amy, Miss Cardinal's been telling me how confusing London is to her.
You've got as good an idea of London as any one in the world. You
should take her to one or two places and show her things."

Amy Warlock, every line of her stiff body firing at them both her
hostility, answered:

"Oh, I don't think Miss Cardinal would care for me as a guide. _I_
shouldn't be able to show her interesting things. We have scarcely, I
should fancy, enough in common. Miss Cardinal's interests are, I
imagine, very different from my own."

The tone, the words, fell into the sudden silence like a lighted match
into water. Maggie, her head erect, her voice, in spite of herself,
trembling a little, answered:

"Why, Miss Warlock, I shouldn't think of troubling you. It's very kind
of your brother, but one must make one's discoveries for oneself,
mustn't one? ... I am already beginning to find my way about."

After that the tea-part