child and the old man, but between the
adolescent and the old it is wide and deep. And she was eager where he
was retiring, confident where he was suspicious. With what of pity,
lovely but half-patronising too, did she solace him!... Between them lay
the gulf not only of a generation but of a different habit of thought,
of alien tastes, which not all his passionate clutching or her impatient
tenderness could bridge for more than a few moments of clinging together
against the world. None of this did he realise, neither did Hilaria, so
they were spared much unhappiness, merely fretting blindly without
knowing why.

Hilaria was not a beauty, though she would be considered more nearly so
now than then, when a high forehead and well-sleeked hair were almost
necessities of life. Her low brow--truly Greek in its straightness and
the crisp ripple of her hair around it--was not in favour at that time.
The hair, which was of a dull ashen brown, was strained back tightly and
confined by a round comb. Her eyebrows, too straight for the period and
too thick, nearly met above the short, tip-tilted nose, freckled as a
plover's egg, and that at a time when no well brought-up damsel ventured
forth in the sun's rays without veil or parasol. Her face was deficient
in modelling, being one of those subtly concave faces not without a
fascination of their own, with an egg-like curve of prominent
delicately-square chin. Her mouth, too large, opened very beautifully
when she laughed over square thickly-white teeth. Her eyes were small
and of no particular colour, though bright with a birdlike shining
between the thick short lashes of a neutral brown. She had a something
boyish in poise and action that really made her charm, but that also set
her hopelessly out of her time. It was impossible to imagine Hilaria
happy in a crinoline, and she fought them fiercely, yet crinolines were
in full flower, and the one disported by the doctor's daughter of a
Sunday was the admiration and envy of the feminine members of the town.
"I should feel I was in a cage," quoth Hilaria at the suggestion that
she should trammel her long legs in such a contraption--unconsciously
hitting on the essential reason for the allure of crinolines. She had to
wear one now for dancing-class, as it made movement and spacing so
different; but other times she went her wilful way, short nose in air,
encouraged by the complacence of her father, who had no more knowledge
of what the c