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superior; the condescending but critical great-lady who finds the state of affairs prevailing among her inferiors very far from her liking. It was in Lauretta’s nature to be a sort of exacting Lady Bountiful.
    Anna stood quietly, submitting to the critical, disapproving regard, with her slim brown hands that were even more delicate than Lauretta’s, hanging at her sides. She flushed slightly, resenting the criticism and thepatronage. The quick blood rose under the clear, warm-cream skin, a bright light, like enmity, leapt into the grey-veiled eyes. The instinctive blood-recoil from an opposing – nature.
    It was hot and airless in the house, so they went and sat at the edge of the chestnut-wood where there was a breeze blowing. Anna built a seat for Lauretta among the rocks, cushioning it with grass and the soft, greyish, fibrous moss from the stones. The sunshine, the wonderful, pure, rich mountain sunshine, like a flood of liquid gold, was pouring down upon the world. The wood was all in motion, restless and uneasy, the green leaves lifting and dipping and weaving in a watery way, so that an ocean of green wavelets seemed to have blown inland.
    Lauretta sat on the rock in her flowery dress that was so unmistakably, elegantly expensive, and talked to her niece. She was trying very hard to be charming and winsome and sympathetic to the queer, uncommunicative child.
    Anna was reserved and rather distant; she could not help being a little nervous with this sophisticated, elegant, unfamiliar woman, this visitor from another world. Nervous and perhaps a little envious as well. She was proud; she did not want to envy. But she could not shut herself off from the strange, other-world fascination of experienced, assertive perfection that Lauretta possessed: that and the hidden, implacable authority that lurked all the time behind her winning, smiling manner. She made Anna feel clumsy and constrained; and Anna was quite aware that in spite of all her charming kindliness she intended it to be so. Lauretta was very consciously the superior, putting Anna in her humble place with a cunning technique of apparent friendliness.
    ‘She despises me,’ thought Anna, ‘because I’m not beautifully dressed and because I don’t live in the same way as she does.’
    She felt hurt and resentful. At one moment she envied Lauretta; the next she disliked her.
    She became silent. The occasional words fell with difficulty from her lips. Her bright, steady, steel-cold eyes never altered. She maintained a sort of steely blankness towards Lauretta, the inevitable enemy.
    It made Lauretta angry. She was definitely repelled, this time, by her niece. The tall, quiet, boyish, unchildlike little female with her cold, impersonal grey eyes was really repulsive to her. She could not bear the temperate, almost inhuman steadiness of those grey-blue eyes. And she couldn’t bear the self-contained reserve of the strange girl, resisting her own charming advances. She went away in anger.
    Anna’s mind was troubled by the visit. Was she missing something? she asked herself. Wasn’t there, perhaps, something admirable and amusing about the life of the world, the life from which she was completely cut off? And wasn’t something lacking in herself?
    James Forrester returned at twilight when the small wild lupins in the grass glimmered white and ghostly like miniature turrets of phosphorescence.
    ‘A pleasant afternoon?’ he said to his daughter, smiling.
    And for a moment on both faces, the grey, grim, haughty face of the man, and the brooding, pale-dark face of the child, the same smile rested, the secret, inward smile of understanding which came from the blood, glamorous.
    ‘I don’t think my aunt liked me very much,’ said Anna, smiling upwards, a bit cunning in the dusk. ‘She tried to make me feel ashamed of myself.’
    ‘And did she succeed?’ he asked.
    ‘No!’ Anna said loyally, and her eyes flashed.
    But the father knew that she did not speak