hrough the dull
window-glass of dusty offices at Properley, an Estate and House Agent,
Surveyor, Valuer and Auctioneer; she was the prettiest of six, with two
brothers, neither of the least use, but, thanks to the manner in which
their main natural protector appeared to languish under the accumulation
of his attributes, they couldn't be said very particularly or positively
to live. Their continued collective existence was a good deal of a
miracle even to themselves, though they had fallen into the way of not
unnecessarily, or too nervously, exchanging remarks upon it, and had
even in a sort, from year to year, got used to it. Nan's brooding
pinkness when he talked to her, her so very parted lips, considering her
pretty teeth, her so very parted eyelids, considering her pretty eyes,
all of which might have been those of some waxen image of uncritical
faith, cooled the heat of his helplessness very much as if he were
laying his head on a tense silk pillow. She had, it was true, forms
of speech, familiar watchwords, that affected him as small scratchy
perforations of the smooth surface from within; but his pleasure in
her and need of her were independent of such things and really almost
altogether determined by the fact of the happy, even if all so lonely,
forms and instincts in her which claimed kinship with his own. With
her natural elegance stamped on her as by a die, with her dim and
disinherited individual refinement of grace, which would have made any
one wonder who she was anywhere--hat and veil and feather-boa and smart
umbrella-knob and all--with her regular God-given distinction of type,
in fine, she couldn't abide vulgarity much more than he could.

Therefore it didn't seem to him, under his stress, to matter
particularly, for instance, if she _would_ keep on referring so many
things to the time, as she called it, when she came into his life--his
own great insistence and contention being that she hadn't in the least
entered there till his mind was wholly made up to eliminate his other
friend. What that methodical fury was so fierce to bring home to him was
the falsity to herself involved in the later acquaintance; whereas just
his precious right to hold up his head to everything--before himself at
least--sprang from the fact that she couldn't make dates fit anyhow.
He hadn't so much as heard of his true beauty's existence (she had come
back but a few weeks before from her two years with her terribly trying
decea