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window on the hot July day, extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily assured. Her face was vehement; childlike yet haggard; with, already, the indication of a line running along the cheek to the corner of the mouth, and a deeper line engraved across her forehead, which she showed when she doffed her hat, unceremoniously, for tea. She showed then, too, a beautifully shaped head, the dark hair, thick and dense and straight, brushed back from a meditative arch of brow; and the indignant composure of her large eyes made Monica think of a Byzantine Madonna. ‘A repellent little face!’ That had been the involuntary, the irrepressible verdict that had surged up in Monica’s mind on seeing her fully. In her considering gaze she read already the relegation of her own standards and significances. Hester would never trouble to controvert them; she would merely look away from them, and over them; they were not so much out of date as irrelevant; and a woman of the Hester type had no time for irrelevancies. Monica saw her placing her and deciding how to deal with her as they sat face to face, she herself, as she too well knew, wearing the smile that her own panic forced from her. Hester did not smile; she answered questions and asked none, looking now and then