e sisters was written the beauty of their lives. Guy could almost
see every hour of their girlhood passing in orderly pattern as the
divine Houris dance along a Grecian frieze. There was neither passion
nor sentiment in the music; there was neither sorrow nor regret. It was
heartless in its limpid beauty; it was remote as a cloud against the
sunrise; cold as water was it, and incommunicable as a dream; yet in
solitude when Guy reconjured the sound afterwards, it returned to his
memory like fire.

A great occasion for Guy was the afternoon when first the Greys came to
tea with him at Plashers Mead. Himself went into Wychford and bought
the cakes, so many that Miss Peasey held up her hands with that
ridiculously conventional gesture of surprise she used, exclaiming:

"Oh, dear, this _is_ a variety!"

Guy led them solemnly round the house and furnished the empty rooms with
such vivid descriptions that their emptiness was scarcely any longer
perceptible. In his own room he waited anxiously for judgment. Margaret
was, of course, the first to declare an opinion. She did not like his
curtains nor his green canvas, and she was by no means willing to accept
his excuse that they were relics of undergraduate taste.

"If you don't like them now, why do you have them? Why not plain white
for the walls and no curtains at all, until you can get ones you really
do like?"

Pauline was afraid his feelings would be hurt and declared with such
transparent dishonesty how greatly she loved everything in the room that
Guy, grateful though he was to her intended sweetness, was more
discouraged than ever. Monica objected to his having Our Lady on the
mantelshelf, and would not admit her as Saint Rose of Lima; but Guy was
enough in awe of Monica not to justify the identification with Saint
Rose by his desire for a poetic apostrophe. As for Mrs. Grey, she
behaved as she always did when Monica and Margaret were being
critical--that is, by firing off "charmings!" in a sort of benevolent
musketry; but if Guy was not convinced by her "charmings!" he could not
resist her when she said:

"I think Guy's room is charming ... charming!"

He felt his room could be an absolute failure if from the ashes of its
reputation he were alluded to actually for the first time as "Guy." Gone
then was Mr. Hazlewood; fled were those odious "misses." He turned to
Pauline and said, momentously, boldly:

"I say, Pauline, you haven't seen my new kitten."

She blu