Page:Crawford - Love in idleness.djvu/15

 is that I never shall. Who are the three Miss Miners, and who is Miss Trehearne?"

"Oh—you don't know them!" Lawrence's voice expressed his surprise that there should be any one who did not know the ladies in question. "Well—they're three old maids, you know."

"Excuse me, I don't know. Old maid is such a vague term. How old must a maid be, to be an old maid?"

"Oh—it isn't age that makes old maids. It's the absence of youth. They're born so."

"A pleasing paradox," remarked the Professor, his exaggerated jaw seeming to check the uneasy smile, as it attacked the gravity of his colourless thin lips.

His head, in the full face view, was not too large for his body, which, in the two dimensions of length and breadth, was well proportioned. The absence of the third dimension, that is, of bodily thickness, was very apparent when he was seen sideways, while the exaggeration of the skull was also noticeable only in profile. The forehead and the long delicate jaw were