alleys was also rather curious. Her conversation, when she had
any, was a little obvious in its conventionality. It seemed to Betty,
when she looked at her, surprising that this should be so. She was
pleasant to look at, slim and tall, with head poised a little high, a
little backwards; her short upper lip was caught up a little from her
lower, seeming to carry out the character of the round, lifted chin and
backward-poised head. Over her far-seeing grey eyes her fair brows often
puckered thoughtfully, as if they strove to discern. The winter
sunshine, striking in through the window, made of her light hair a
fluffy aureole. There was, perhaps, a Puritan touch somewhere about her,
emphasized by the simple lines of her green painting-smock. There was
also something remote, inaccessible. Her grey eyes, dwelling on Betty,
were artist's eyes; they seemed to take in every line, carefully noting,
and to give out nothing. There was in their regard a certain quality of
reserve, an implication of something held back.

Betty, returning the look with her own melancholy child's gaze, took it
in without interpretation or analysis. It happens sometimes that for the
interpretation of a look we have to wait for spaces of years.
Apprehension is a thing of gradual growth; sudden lightening is rare.

Betty felt it a pity that Miss Varley was not a more conversational
person, or at least that her conversation should be so very unexciting,
so obvious. In the unquiet condition of Vesuvius, in the fact that a
great number of visitors were staying in Naples, Betty felt not the
least interest. But Miss Varley seemed disinclined to talk of other
things; when the conversation tended to become at all autobiographical
she became inattentive and absorbed. Betty, lest she should become bored
(an unthinkable calamity), started a game, something of the nature of
that which she and Tommy played with Mrs. Venables; the object in this
case was to produce the sudden curve of the lifted upper lip, the quick
twinkle in the grey eyes, which seemed to come irrepressibly, and half
against the owner's will. When Betty scored a point--it really happened
fairly often--it cheered her very much.

It was curious how much she liked Prudence Varley. She would have liked
to see a great deal of her, not in the rarefied altitude of the studio,
but in a more human and convivial atmosphere. She would very much have
liked to ask her to tea (the Crevequers hated tea as a drin