himself. This girl seemed divinely unaware even of any strangeness in
the position in which she now found herself--the unawareness of an
angel.... When Killigrew talked to her she answered frankly and freely,
almost with the confidence of a child. She could not be more than
twenty, Ishmael decided, and with all her maturity of build had a
childish air. The fashions of the day were not conducive to youthfulness
of appearance; but not even the long full skirts trimmed with bands of
black velvet or the close-fitting bodice could make her seem other than
a schoolgirl, while the hair worn brushed loosely back from the forehead
instead of brought down in sleek waves gave her a look that reminded him
of someone, though he could not remember whom. Then with a sudden flash
he remembered it was Hilaria, little Hilaria Eliot--she too had that
look which, being in the middle of the period himself, he did not
recognise as alien to its stamp, but which was so conspicuously so that
women might have called it dowdy and men individual. But this girl was
feminine, that was obvious in the timid shyness even of her trusting
attitude.

Oddly enough--or oddly as if seemed to Ishmael, who was wont to be in
the background when out with Killigrew--it was to him that she chiefly
addressed herself. Killigrew sat watching as from general remarks of
great propriety about the weather and Ishmael's opinions of London as a
place to visit they passed to her views on it as a place in which to
live. These were, apparently, not over favourable.

"One always feels a stranger, in a way, if one was born and brought up
in the country, doesn't one? I feel that every day. I've never got over
expecting to see the big elm outside my window when I wake, and instead
I see the chimney-pots. And then I may just be getting used to it when
there arrives a letter from Papa telling me how it all looks at