to think, feel, laugh, or express herself, instead of dropping milk
from a height as though to see what kind of drops it made, she might be
interesting though never exactly pretty. She was like her mother, as the
image in a pool on a still summer's day is like the vivid flushed face
that hangs over it.

Meanwhile Helen herself was under examination, though not from either of
her victims. Mr. Pepper considered her; and his meditations, carried
on while he cut his toast into bars and neatly buttered them, took him
through a considerable stretch of autobiography. One of his penetrating
glances assured him that he was right last night in judging that Helen
was beautiful. Blandly he passed her the jam. She was talking nonsense,
but not worse nonsense than people usually do talk at breakfast, the
cerebral circulation, as he knew to his cost, being apt to give trouble
at that hour. He went on saying "No" to her, on principle, for he never
yielded to a woman on account of her sex. And here, dropping his eyes
to his plate, he became autobiographical. He had not married himself for
the sufficient reason that he had never met a woman who commanded his
respect. Condemned to pass the susceptible years of youth in a railway
station in Bombay, he had seen only coloured women, military women,
official women; and his ideal was a woman who could read Greek, if not
Persian, was irreproachably fair in the face, and able to understand the
small things he let fall while undressing. As it was he had contracted
habits of which he was not in the least ashamed. Certain odd minutes
every day went to learning things by heart; he never took a ticket
without noting the number; he devoted January to Petronius, February to
Catullus, March to the Etruscan vases perhaps; anyhow he had done good
work in India, and there was nothing to regret in his life except the
fundamental defects which no wise man regrets, when the present is still
his. So concluding he looked up suddenly and smiled. Rachel caught his