ay? N--no.' The younger woman looked at the chill grey
world through the window, and followed up the hesitating negative with a
quite definite, 'I couldn't stand slums to-day.' The two exchanged the
look that means, 'Here we are again up against this recurring
difference.' But there was no ill-humour in either face as their eyes
met.

Between these two daughters of one father existed that sort of haunting
family resemblance often seen between two closely related persons,
despite one being attractive and the other in some way repellent. The
observer traces the same lines in each face, the same intensification of
'the family look' in the smile, and yet knows that the slight disparity
in age fails to account for a difference wide as the poles.

And not alone difference of taste, of environment and experience, not
these alone make up the sum of their unlikeness. You had only to look
from the fresh simplicity of white muslin blouse and olive-coloured
cloth in the one case, to the ungainly expensiveness of the black silk
gown of the married woman, in order to get from the first a sense of
dainty morning freshness, and from Mrs. Fox-Moore not alone a lugubrious
_memento mori_ sort of impression, but that more disquieting reminder of
the ugly and over-elaborate thing life is to many an estimable soul.
Janet Fox-Moore had the art of rubbing this dark fact in till, so to
speak, the black came off. She seemed to achieve it partly by dint of
wearing (instead of any relief of lace or even of linen at her throat) a
hard band of that passementerie secretly so despised of the little
Tunbridges. This device did not so much 'finish off' the neck of Mrs.
Fox-Moore's gowns, as allow the funereal dulness of them to overflow on
to her brown neck. It even cast an added shadow on her sallow cheek. The
figure of the older woman, gaunt and thin enough, announced the further
constriction of the corset. By way of revenge the sharp shoulder-blades
poked the corset out till it defined a ridge in the black silk back. In
front, too, the slab-like figure declined co-operation with the corset,
and withdrew, leaving a hiatus that the silk bodice clothed though it
did not conceal. You could not have told whether the other woman wore
that ancient invention for a figure insufficient or over-exuberant. As
you followed her movements, easy with the ease of a child, while she
walked or stooped or caught up the fragile Doris, or raised her arm to
take a book fr