e so swift and
eager, so little clumsy or jerking, that Jenny had a carriage to
command admiration. The resemblance between the sisters was ordinarily
not noticeable. It would have needed a photograph--because photographs,
besides flattening the features, also in some manner "compose" and
distinguish them--to reveal the likenesses in shape, in shadow, even in
outline, which were momentarily obscured by the natural differences of
colouring and expression. Emmy was less dark, more temperamentally
unadventurous, stouter, and possessed of more colour. She was
twenty-eight or possibly twenty-nine, and her mouth was rather too hard
for pleasantness. It was not peevish, but the lips were set as though
she had endured much. Her eyes, also, were hard; although if she cried
one saw her face soften remarkably into the semblance of that of a
little girl. From an involuntary defiance her expression changed to
something really pathetic. One could not help loving her then, not with
the free give and take of happy affection, but with a shamed hope that
nobody could read the conflict of sympathy and contempt which made one's
love frigid and self-conscious. Jenny rarely cried: her cheeks reddened
and her eyes grew full of tears; but she did not cry. Her tongue was too
ready and her brain too quick for that. Also, she kept her temper from
flooding over into the self-abandonment of angry weeping and
vituperation. Perhaps it was that she had too much pride--or that in
general she saw life with too much self-complacency, or that she was not
in the habit of yielding to disappointment. It may have been that Jenny
belonged to that class of persons who are called, self-sufficient. She
plunged through a crisis with her own zest, meeting attack with
counter-attack, keeping her head, surveying with the instinctive
irreverence and self-protective wariness of the London urchin the
possibilities and swaying fortunes of the fight. Emmy, so much slower,
so much less self-reliant, had no refuge but in scolding that grew
shriller and more shrill until it ended in violent weeping, a withdrawal
from the field entirely abject. She was not a born fighter. She was
harder on the surface, but weaker in powers below the surface. Her long
solitudes had made her build up grievances, and devastating thoughts,
had given her a thousand bitter things to fling into the conflict; but
they had not strengthened her character, and she could not stand the
strain of prolonged