irreverence for every form of human worth and her trust in a providence
which had seldom failed her, she smiled at the cult of Alice's friends,
as she did at the girl's seriousness, which also she felt herself able to
keep from going too far.

While she did not object to the sympathy of these ladies, whatever
inspired it, she encouraged another intimacy which grew up
contemporaneously with theirs, and which was frankly secular and
practical, though the girl who attached herself to Alice with one of
those instant passions of girlhood was also in every exterior observance
a strict and diligent Churchwoman. The difference was through the
difference of Boston and New York in everything: the difference between
idealising and the realising tendency. The elderly and middle-aged Boston
women who liked Alice had been touched by something high yet sad in the
beauty of her face at church; the New York girl promptly owned that she
had liked her effect the first Sunday she saw her there, and she knew in
a minute she never got those things on this side; her obeisances and
genuflections throughout the service, much more profound and punctilious
than those of any one else there, had apparently not prevented her from
making a thorough study of Alice's costume and a correct conjecture as to
its authorship.

Miss Anderson, who claimed a collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook,
tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her
in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood,
with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left
her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in
suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting
over its bridge, and turning out distinctly 'retrousse'. This gave her
profile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with that