n with these two rather seedy persons.

"I don't really know what I can do for you, Mrs. Hughs. I'll speak to
Mr. Dallison, and to Mr. Hilary too."

"Yes, ma'am; thank you, ma'am."

With a smile which seemed to deprecate its own appearance,
Cecilia grasped her skirts and crossed the road. "I hope I wasn't
unsympathetic," she thought, looking back at the three figures on the
edge of the pavement--the old man with his papers, and his discoloured
nose thrust upwards under iron-rimmed spectacles; the seamstress in her
black dress; the skimpy little boy. Neither speaking nor moving, they
were looking out before them at the traffic; and something in Cecilia
revolted at this sight. It was lifeless, hopeless, unaesthetic.

"What can one do," she thought, "for women like Mrs. Hughs, who always
look like that? And that poor old man! I suppose I oughtn't to have
bought that dress, but Stephen is tired of this."

She turned out of the main street into a road preserved from commoner
forms of traffic, and stopped at a long low house half hidden behind the
trees of its front garden.

It was the residence of Hilary Dallison, her husband's brother, and
himself the husband of Bianca, her own sister.

The queer conceit came to Cecilia that it resembled Hilary. Its look
was kindly and uncertain; its colour a palish tan; the eyebrows of
its windows rather straight than arched, and those deep-set eyes, the
windows, twinkled hospitably; it had, as it were, a sparse moustache
and beard of creepers, and dark marks here and there, like the lines and
shadows on the faces of those who think too much. Beside it, and apart,
though connected by a passage, a studio stood, and about that studio--of
white rough-cast, with a black oak door, and peacock-blue paint--was
something a little hard and fugitive, well suited to Bianca, who used
it, indeed, to paint in. It seemed to stand, with its eyes on the house,
shrinking defiantly from too close company, as though it could not
entirely give itself to anything. Cecilia, who often worried over the
relations between her sister and her brother-in-law, suddenly felt how
fitting and symbolical this was.

But, mistrusting inspirations, which, experience told her, committed one
too much, she walked quickly up the stone-flagged pathway to the door.
Lying in the porch was a little moonlight-coloured lady bulldog, of
toy breed, who gazed up with eyes like agates, delicately waving her
bell-rope tail, as it wa