.

She was startled, she was touched, she, who rarely felt it, felt
shyness. She had known that this dark, still woman was observing her,
and had known, for all the other's reserve, that the observation was not
antagonistic. Something in Mrs. Drent had made her feel that it would be
easy, a relief, to talk to her about all one's miseries and desolations.
But the sudden leap of spiritual fire found her unprepared. She was a
little ashamed, as though her own reality were somewhat unreal beside
Mrs. Drent's belief in it. There had been something pleasant in the
tracing of her little tragedy, something sweet in the thought of that
sad castle of her soul, with its stilled music, its fading enchantments;
but Mrs. Drent had seen only the tragedy; and had felt the danger of
withering, of becoming acquiescent and commonplace, with an intensity of
which she herself was incapable. Such response, such understanding,
might well take one's breath away.

This scene was the beginning of their long friendship. It was a charming
friendship. Milly Quentyn, for all the clouds of her background, was a
creature of sunshine, of sunshine in a mist, a creature of endearing
fluctuations. Indeed, Christina told her afterwards, when they analyzed
the beginnings, it had been her childlike radiance, her smiles, her air
as of rifts of blue over a rainy landscape--(for everybody knew that
Dick and Milly Quentyn didn't hit it off)--it had been these sweet,
these doubly pathetic qualities that had first attracted her. "I am not
easily attracted," said Christina. "Had there been a languishing hint of
the _femme incomprise_ about you, any air of self-pity, I should never
have so longed to take care of you, to try to help to make you happier.
But you were made for happiness and beauty, and if you didn't succeed in
keeping them one saw that it would hurt you dreadfully. It was that that
so appealed."

And Milly confessed to Christina that she had been at first a good deal
afraid of her, as the distinguished young poetess, and had thought of
her as a sombre and humourless little personage, only reassuring in
being so enchantingly well-dressed.

In Christina Drent's poetry the numbness that had descended upon her
after her husband's death had found a partial awakening. The poems were
not great things, but they were written without a touch of artifice.
They were sudden, spontaneous and swift, and it was as if, in reading
them, one heard a distant wail or s