th invisible
nails hammered into her skull.

Hester Jennings, Mrs. Jennings's daughter, was the young art student
like Rose's self, to whom she and her friends had naturally looked for
congenial companionship where the girl was concerned; and if she did not
find it with Hester, she was not likely to discover it in any of the
other residents at No. 12 Welby Square. Naturally Rose did not greatly
affect the remaining members of that elderly society, on which Mrs.
Jennings professed to set store. She could not help liking Mrs.
Jennings, though, alas! Rose scarcely believed in her so much as she
would have been justified in doing.

In Mrs. Jennings's daughter, who had been from the first thought of as
a friend for Rose, she believed entirely. Yet Rose had been in the
beginning both startled by Hester Jennings and disappointed in her.

Hester Jennings looked considerably older than she was, which was about
Annie Millar's age; in fact, she was prematurely worn with study and
work. She was like her mother on a larger scale, with advantages of a
fair paleness and remarkable violet-blue eyes, which Mrs. Jennings had
never possessed. Hester might have passed for a lovely young woman if
she had cared in the least to do it. But never was girl more indifferent
to such claims or more capable of doing her worst to qualify them and
render them the next thing to null and void. When Annie Millar made
Hester Jennings's acquaintance, Annie maintained that there was
something left out in Hester's composition, the part which makes a woman
desire to look well in the eyes of her neighbours, and win admiration,
though the admiration be as skin deep as the beauty which creates it.

To think that a daughter of Mrs. Jennings, an artist in her own right,
could dress so badly, with such a careless contempt for patterns and
colours, in such ill-fitting frocks and dowdy or grotesque hats! Her
preference for strident aniline dyes and gigantic stripes and checks in
the different articles of her costume looked very like perversity;
especially when it was shown that with reference to other persons, in
arranging to paint a portrait, for instance, no one, not Mrs. Jennings,
displayed such a fine sense of fitness and harmony as Hester exhibited.
Dress was to her, in her private character, mere necessary clothing,
warm or cool as the season required. It was not worth the waste of
thought implied by turning it over in her mind. Her mother dressed for
the f