"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of
the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to
us. "One of the best workers you have," he said. . . .

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross
from the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers'
house. It seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white
panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace
between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave
and fine--and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like
a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow
under her cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss
Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of
thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every phrase
and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man,
who seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was manifest that
he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion
she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite
of the taunts of either him or her father. She was, they discovered
with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity too rare for
them to miss. They proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that
brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between appeal
and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I thought
at the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality was so
distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl
reading. Miss Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue