Page:The Finer Grain (London, Methuen & Co., 1910).djvu/61

Rh according to her remarkable nature, this added no grace to the turn of the wheel of their fortune,—which was, so deplorably, that any fledgling of their general nest (and Mora was but gone twenty-one, and really clever with her brush) should have such a nature. It wasn't that, since her coming to them at fifteen, they had been ever, between themselves, at their ease about her,—glossed over, as everything had somehow come to be, by the treacherous fact of her beauty. She had been such a credit to them that way that if it hadn't put them, as earnest observers, quite off their guard, the dazzle and charm of it appeared mostly to have misled their acquaintance. That was the worst cruelty for them, that with such a personal power to please she shouldn't, even on some light irregular line, have flown, as might have been conceived, higher. These things were dreadful, were even grotesque, to say; but what wasn't so now—after his difficult, his critical, his distinctly conclusive and, above all, as he secretly appraised it, his unexpectedly and absurdly interesting interview with Mr Puddick? This passage, deplorably belated by Mora's own extraordinary artful action, had but just taken place, and it had sent him back to Jane saddled with the queerest and most difficult errand of his life.

He hadn't, however, on his return, at once sought her in the drawing-room,—though her plan of campaign had been that they should fly their flag as high as ever, and, changing none of their refined habits,