to be liked because she was as careful of others as she was of herself,
and she never was childishly greedy about such admiration as she won, as
girls often are, perhaps because she did not care for it. Up to this time
it is doubtful if her heart had been touched even by the fancies that
shake the surface of the soul of youth, and perhaps it was for this
reason that her seriousness at first fretted Mrs. Pasmer with a vague
anxiety for her future.

Mrs. Pasmer herself remained inalienably Unitarian, but she was aware of
the prodigious-growth which the Church had been making in society, and
when Alice showed her inclination for it, she felt that it was not at all
as if she had developed a taste for orthodoxy; when finally it did not
seem likely to go too far, it amused Mrs. Pasmer that her daughter should
have taken so intensely to the Anglican rite.

In the hotel it attached to her by a common interest several of the
ladies who had seen her earnestly responsive at the little Owen
chapel--ladies left to that affectional solitude which awaits long
widowhood through the death or marriage of children; and other ladies,
younger, but yet beginning to grow old with touching courage. Alice was
especially a favourite with the three or four who represented their class
and condition at the Ty'n-y Coed, and who read the best books read there,
and had the gentlest manners. There was a tacit agreement among these
ladies, who could not help seeing the difference in the temperaments of
the mother and daughter, that Mrs. Pasmer did not understand Alice; but
probably there were very few people except herself whom Mrs. Pasmer did
not understand quite well. She understood these ladies and their
compassion for Alice, and she did not in the least resent it. She was
willing that people should like Alice for any reason they chose, if they
did not go too far. With her little flutter of futile deceits, her