ten. They had been there for a fortnight, and
"the place is a dream," Mrs. Jerry had said in the letter pressing him
to come; but it was at St. Gian that she met the diligence and told
him to descend. Bad-Platten, she explained, was a horror.

Her fuller explanation was that she was becoming known there as the
round lady.

"Now, am I as round as all that?" she said plaintively to Tommy.

"Mrs. Jerry," he replied, with emotion, "you must not ask me what I
think of you." He always treated her with extraordinary respect and
chivalry now, and it awed her.

She had looked too, too round because she was in the company of Lady
Pippinworth. Everyone seemed to be too round or too large by the side
of that gifted lady, who somehow never looked too thin. She knew her
power. When there were women in the room whom she disliked she merely
went and stood beside them. In the gyrations of the dance the onlooker
would momentarily lose sight of her; she came and went like a blinking
candle. Men could not dance with her without its being said that they
were getting stout. There is nothing they dislike so much, yet they
did dance with her. Tommy, having some slight reason, was particularly
sensitive about references to his figure, yet it was Lady Pippinworth
who had drawn him to Switzerland. What was her strange attraction?

Calmly considered, she was preposterously thin, but men, at least,
could not think merely of her thinness, unless, when walking with her,
they became fascinated by its shadow on the ground. She was tall, and
had a very clear, pale complexion and light-brown hair. Light brown,
too, were her heavy eyelashes, which were famous for being
black-tipped, as if a brush had touched them, though it had not. She
made play with her eyelashes as with a fan, and sometimes the upper
and lower seemed to entangle for a moment and be in difficulties, from
which you wanted to extricate them in the tenderest manner. And the
more you wanted to help her the more disdainfully she looked at you.
Yet though she looked disdainful she also looked helpless. Now we have
the secret of her charm.

This helpless disdain was the natural expression of her face, and I am
sure she fell asleep with a curl of the lip. Her scorn of men so
maddened them that they could not keep away from her. "Damn!" they
said under their breath, and rushed to her. If rumour is to be
believed, Sir Harry Pippinworth proposed to her in a fury brought on
by the sneer with