“How old? Why, seventeen, I should say. All girls are seventeen.”
“You are wrong. I am nearly nineteen. Which class of women do you like best, those who seem younger, or those who seem older than they are?”
“Offhand I should be inclined to say those who seem older.”
So it was not Elfride’s class.
“But it is well known,” she said eagerly, and there was something touching in the artless anxiety to be thought much of which she revealed by her words, “that the slower a nature is to develop, the richer the nature. Youths and girls who are men and women before they come of age are nobodies by the time that backward people have shown their full compass.”
“Yes,” said Knight thoughtfully. “There is really something in that remark. But at the risk of offence I must remind you that you there take it for granted that the woman behind her time at a given age has not reached the end of her tether. Her backwardness may be not because she is slow to develop, but because she soon exhausted her capacity for developing.”
Elfride looked disappointed. By this time they were indoors. Mrs. Swancourt, to whom matchmaking by any honest means was meat and drink, had now a little scheme of that nature concerning this pair. The morning-room, in which they both expected to find her, was empty; the old lady having, for the above reason, vacated it by the second door as they entered by the first.
Knight went to the chimneypiece, and carelessly surveyed two portraits on ivory.
“Though these pink ladies had very rudimentary features, judging by what I see here,” he observed, “they had unquestionably beautiful heads of hair.”
“Yes; and that is everything,” said Elfride, possibly conscious of her own, possibly not.
“Not everything; though a great deal, certainly.”
“Which colour do you like best?” she ventured to ask.
“More depends on its abundance than on its colour.”
“Abundances being equal, may I inquire your favourite colour?”
“Dark.”
“I mean for women,” she said, with the minutest fall of countenance, and a hope that she had been misunderstood.
“So do I,” Knight replied.
It was impossible for any man not to know the colour of Elfride’s hair. In women who wear it plainly such a feature may be overlooked by men not given to ocular intentness. But hers was always in the way. You saw her hair as far as you could see her sex, and knew that it was the palest brown. She knew instantly that Knight, being perfectly aware of this, had an independent standard of admiration in the matter.
Elfride was thoroughly vexed. She could not but be struck with the honesty of his opinions, and the worst of it was, that the more they went against her, the more she respected them. And now, like a reckless gambler, she hazarded her last and best treasure. Her eyes: they were her all now.
“What coloured eyes do you like best, Mr. Knight?” she said slowly.
“Honestly, or as a compliment?”
“Of course honestly; I don’t want anybody’s compliment!”
And yet Elfride knew otherwise: that a compliment or word of approval from that man then would have been like a well to a famished Arab.
“I prefer hazel,” he said serenely.
She had played and lost again.
XIX
“Love was in the next degree.”
Knight had none of those light familiarities of speech which, by judicious touches of epigrammatic flattery, obliterate a woman’s recollection of the speaker’s abstract opinions. So no more was said by either on the subject of hair, eyes, or development. Elfride’s mind had been impregnated with sentiments of her own smallness to an uncomfortable degree of distinctness, and her discomfort was visible in her face. The whole tendency of the conversation latterly had been to quietly but surely disparage her; and she was fain to take Stephen into favour in self-defence. He would not have been so unloving, she said, as to admire an idiosyncrasy and features different from her own. True, Stephen had declared he loved her: Mr. Knight had never done anything of the sort. Somehow this did not mend matters, and the sensation of her smallness in Knight’s eyes still remained. Had the position been reversed—had Stephen loved her in spite of a differing taste, and had Knight been indifferent in spite of her resemblance to his ideal, it would have engendered far happier thoughts. As matters stood, Stephen’s admiration might have its root in a blindness the result of passion. Perhaps any keen man’s judgment was condemnatory of her.
During the remainder of Saturday they were more or less thrown with their seniors, and no conversation arose which was exclusively their own. When Elfride was in bed that night her thoughts recurred to the same subject. At one moment she insisted that it was ill-natured of him to speak so decisively as he had done; the next, that it was sterling honesty.
“Ah, what a poor nobody I am!” she said, sighing. “People like him, who go about the great world, don’t care in the least what I am like either in mood or feature.”
Perhaps a man who has got thoroughly into a woman’s mind in this manner, is halfway to her heart; the distance between those two stations is proverbially short.
“And are you really going away this week?” said Mrs. Swancourt to Knight on the following evening, which was Sunday.
They were all leisurely climbing the hill to the church, where a last service was now to be held at the rather exceptional time of evening instead of in the afternoon, previous to the demolition of the ruinous portions.
“I am intending to cross to Cork from Bristol,” returned Knight; “and then I go on to Dublin.”
“Return this way, and stay a little longer with us,” said the vicar. “A week is
