not
become as she had advanced in years! How much more docile and
unassuming! She saw other girls marrying men not unlike Denis Malster;
so why couldn't she? She concluded that it must evidently be the fate of
modern women to accept the third-rate, the third-best--in fact
disillusionment as a law of their beings; and having no one to support
her in her soundest instincts, she began rather to doubt the validity of
their claim, than to turn resolutely away from marriage altogether.

And now there was to be a complication in her trouble. Leonetta was
returning home for good--Leonetta, the child eight years her junior,
Leonetta was now as fresh, as attractive, and as blooming, as she
herself had been when she was just seventeen, and whom, from habit, she
still called "Baby."

Quietly she had waited and waited for the man of her heart, and been
able to do this without the additional annoyance of competition to
disturb or excite her. Peacefully these seven years she had lain like a
watcher on the shore, scanning the horizon with her glass, without even
a nudge of the elbow from her younger sister. And now she was no longer
to be alone. A distracting, possibly an utterly defeating element was
going to be introduced into her peaceful though anxious existence, and
she shuddered unmistakably at the thought.

As yet she had harboured no conscious hostility towards her junior,
merely a desire to keep her as long as possible at a distance, in order
that the one relationship of which she had the deepest dread--that of
competitors in the same field--might be warded off indefinitely, or,
better still, never experienced between them.

She did not yet fear Baby. The disparity in their ages seemed too great
and too obvious for that: but in recollecting certain incidents in their
childhood, and one or two things about Baby's appearance and behaviour
during the last two years, Cleopatra could not entirely free herself
from a perfectly definite feeling of vexation in regard to her sister.
Baby had not troubled her at all as an infant. It was as a child of
eight, when Cleopatra was just sixteen, that her sister had first
revealed disquieting proclivities. She had, for instance, a command of
blandishments which to her elder were a closed book. By means of wiles
and cajoleries utterly inimitable, she could extract money and presents
from adults from whom the haughty Cleopatra would not even have
solicited a kiss. In five years Baby had rec