aiety? Would she be better looking if she were to let her
hair grow long again? What had Mrs. Page, who looked as if she had
stepped down from one of those old prints, thought of her?

Beneath the hard brightness of her manner there was a passionate groping
toward some dimly seen but intensely felt ideal. She longed to learn if
she could only learn without confessing her ignorance. Her pride was the
obstinate, unreasonable pride of a child.

"If I could only find out things without asking!" The image of Stephen
rose in her mind, which worked by flashes of insight rather than orderly
processes. She saw his earnest young face, with the sleek dark hair,
which swept in a point back from his forehead, his sombre smoke-coloured
eyes, and the firm, slightly priggish line of his mouth. He seemed miles
away from her, separated by some imponderable yet impassable barrier.
The first time her gaze had rested on him at the charity ball she had
thought impetuously, "Any girl could fall in love with a man like that!"
and she had carelessly asked his name of the assiduous Gershom, who
appeared to her to exist in innumerable reflections of himself. The next
day when she had seen Stephen approaching her in the Square, she had
obeyed the same erratic impulse, half in jest and half from the
gambler's instinct to grasp at reluctant opportunity. After all, had not
experience taught her that one must venture in order to win, that
nothing came to those who dared not stake the whole of life on the next
turn of fortune? She had been startled out of her composure by the sight
of Stephen at the dinner; and yet she had not been conscious of any
particular wish to see him again, or to sit at his side through two
hours of embarrassment and uncertainty. Now, on the way home, she was
suffering acutely from the burden of failure, from the smarting
realization of her own ignorance and awkwardness. Her one bitter-sweet
consolation was the knowledge that she had been "a good loser," that she
had carried off her humiliation with a scornful pride which must have
blighted like frost any tenderly budding shoots of compassion. "I'll
show them that they mustn't pity me!" she thought, while her eyes blazed
in the darkness. "I'll prove to them that I think myself every bit as
good as they are!" She knew that her manner had been ungracious; but she
knew also that something stronger than her will, some instinct which was
rooted deep in the secret places of her natur