birthday, and she was twenty-seven now.

Alice, the youngest girl (she was twenty-three) lay stretched out on
the sofa.

She departed in no way from her sister's type but that her body was
slender and small boned, that her face was lightly finished, that her
gray eyes were clear and her lips pale against the honey-white of her
face, and that her hair was colorless as dust except where the edge of
the wave showed a dull gold.

Alice had spent the whole evening lying on the sofa. And now she
raised her arms and bent them, pressing the backs of her hands against
her eyes. And now she lowered them and lifted one sleeve of her thin
blouse, and turned up the milk-white under surface of her arm and lay
staring at it and feeling its smooth texture with her fingers.

Gwendolen, the second sister, sat leaning over the table with her
arms flung out on it as they had tossed from her the book she had been
reading.

She was the tallest and the darkest of the three. Her face followed
the type obscurely; and vividly and emphatically it left it. There was
dusk in her honey-whiteness, and dark blue in the gray of her eyes.
The bridge of her nose and the arch of her upper lip were higher,
lifted as it were in a decided and defiant manner of their own. About
Gwenda there was something alert and impatient. Her very supineness
was alive. It had distinction, the savage grace of a creature utterly
abandoned to a sane fatigue.