pretty, as young men nowadays measure beauty, and were it possible, the
truth might have been hidden. She was something too elfish--and then
there was the Billings mouth already mentioned. Gertrude Ellis, who
spent much of her time with her aunt in New York and who had a proper
care for her person, thought it a ridiculous pose for Nancy not to have
something done about her freckles. It was such a simple matter nowadays
to have them removed that obviously only a poseuse would tolerate them.
Still, men were so unobserving about things that they didn't seem to
mind them at all, and Gertrude got nowhere when she once tried to
discuss Nancy with a senior.

"Oh, Nancy is so wonderful that she could look like a leopard and people
wouldn't care," he had said. "It's funny about her, isn't it? She's not
good looking, and yet she's so nice everyone's crazy about her. You have
to hand it to a girl that's like that."

Henry Third, or Harry, as everyone but his father called him, had
immediately given his collection and been rewarded. He had on his best
suit for the occasion and the tie his aunt had sent him on his seventh
and latest birthday. He was a handsome, sturdy boy, and his father
expected a Phi Beta Kappa key of him and an enthusiasm for Marx and John
Stuart Mill. His aunt's plans were vague, but altogether different. At
present she was inclined to favour the family business, with the
understanding that when he was established at its head he should give a
beautiful chapel with a Magdalen tower to the College. His own goal was
the Woodbridge football team and, after that, a locomotive on the run to
New York.

They were met at the door by Annie, Harry's nurse, and by Clarence,
Harry's Airedale. Clarence, who immediately dominated the scene,
rendering Nancy's greeting to Annie vain and perfunctory, was a
three-year-old with a frivolity of manner that ill became his senescent
phiz. Upon its grizzled expanse there would pass in amazing succession
the whole range of canine passion, rage, love, urbanity, shame,
drollery, ennui, and, most frequent of all, curiosity. At present all
his energy was devoted to expressing unmitigated pleasure, the dignity
of which exhibition was continually being marred by sliding rugs. But it
is almost certain that he didn't care a rap for his lost dignity. His
mistress was back after an unconscionable absence, and there was every
reason to believe in the reappearance of the superior brand of soup