home--all the silly little things about the flowers and the chickens and
the old people in the parish, and then I have to start all over again."

There was a strain of wistfulness in her full voice, but her eyes were
limpidly unconscious of it, with their candid glance that suggested
courage and even a certain gaiety. If it had not been for that look in
her eyes she would have seemed doll-like; even as it was in the purely
physical aspect of her there was a waxen dollishness which was at once
disconcerting and attractive. It was obvious that Carminow, who
presumably knew her, was passionately convinced that she was what he
would have called "all right"; that he was considerably more fond of her
than he would have admitted was equally obvious. To him that odd
dollishness of aspect was just the sweet pink and white of a naïve young
girl, but to Killigrew it gave, by its very completeness, a hint as of
something oddly inhuman, or at least unawakened, as though she had been
a puppet, a pretty puppet that walked and spoke and said the right
things. It was not so much any lack of intelligence in what she said as
in her slow speech and her whole look. Her skin was so white--and
Killigrew thought he knew if Ishmael did not how that whiteness was
attained--except for a slight pink flush below extravagantly calm eyes
of a clear pale grey; the modelling of the face was wide across brow and
cheekbones and across the jaw on the level of the too-small mouth; then
came a dimpled chin, short and childish, as was the tip-tilted nose. It
was the type of face which, in its broad modelling of planes and
petal-fineness of edges, suggests a pansy. The blondness of
her--ashen-dead fairness of hair and pale skin with those pellucid eyes
beneath dust-brown brows--all united in an effort of innocence that
surpassed itself and became the blandness of a doll. She was curiously
immobile, sat very quietly, and moved slowly, graceful in the way that
a heavily-built puma is graceful, because of the thoroughly sound