The Buccaneers

was plain and therefore negligible, for she had the precise kind of plainness which, as mothers of rival daughters know, may suddenly blaze into irresistible beauty.

“Oh, that Eglinton girl! She looked at us all as if we weren’t there.”

“Well, that’s the way for a lady to look at strangers,” said Mrs. St George heroically.

I think she’s lovely.”

Closson girl was obviously unaware that any one was looking at her and her absurd dog; it was that absence of self-consciousness which fascinated Nan.

Long before Mrs. St George and Mrs. Elmsworth had agreed on a valuation of the newcomer Nan had fallen under her spell. From the day when she had first seen her come whistling around the corner of the verandah, her restless little head crowned by a flapping Leghorn hat with a rose under the brim, and dragging after her a reluctant poodle with a large red bow, Nan had felt the girl’s careless power.

Nan St George, at sixteen, was at the culminating phase of a passionate admiration for her elder sister. Virginia was all that her junior longed to be: perfectly beautiful, completely self-possessed, calm and sure of herself. Nan, whose whole life was a series of waves of the blood, hot rushes of enthusiasm, icy chills of embarrassment and self-depreciation, looked with envy and admiration at her goddess-like elder.

Even the fact that the Closson girl (so called) was known not to be Closson’s daughter, but to bear some queer exotic name like Santos-Dios (“the Colonel says that’s not swearing, it’s the language,” Mrs. St George explained to Mrs. Elmsworth when they talked the newcomers over) — even this was not enough to calm Mrs. St George. The girl, whatever her real name, was known as Conchita Closson;

queer-looking girl

The words came out slowly, haltingly, as if they had cost him a struggle. Nan had noticed before now that anger was too big a garment for him: it always hung on him in uneasy folds.

“Of course,” Mrs. St George began again, “what I attach most importance to is that my girls should be taught to — to behave like ladies.”