"You mean they are so much touched up!"

"Exactly. That, as it stands, is a sweet, innocent face--an honest
girl's face--almost babyish in its transparency but... the innocence has
all been put into it by the photographer."

"You think so?"

"I know it. Look here at those lines just visible on the cheek. They
disappear, nowhere, at impossible angles. AND the corners of that mouth.
They couldn't go so, with that nose and those puckers. The thing is
not real. It has been atrociously edited. Part is nature's; part, the
photographer's; part, even possibly paint and powder."

"But the underlying face?"

"Is a minx's."

I handed her the letter. "This next?" I asked, fixing my eyes on her as
she looked.

She read it through. For a minute or two she examined it. "The letter
is right enough," she answered, after a second reading, "though its
guileless simplicity is, perhaps, under the circumstances, just a leetle
overdone; but the handwriting--the handwriting is duplicity itself: a
cunning, serpentine hand, no openness or honesty in it. Depend upon it,
that girl is playing a double game."

"You believe, then, there is character in handwriting?"