Circulating Library.She dressed quietly and in excellent taste--in grey or black and white.She had jolly brown eyes and a dimple in the middle of her chin.She was ready to discuss any question with any one, was marvellously broad-minded and tolerant, and although she was both poor and generous, always succeeded in making her little flat in Soho Square pretty and attractive.
Her chief fault, perhaps, was that she cared for no one especially--she had neither lovers nor parents nor sisters nor brothers, and to all her friends she behaved with the same kind geniality, welcoming one as another.She was thus aloof from them all and relied upon no one.The centre of her life was, of course, her religion, but of this she never spoke, although strangely enough no one doubted the intensity of her belief and the reality of her devotion.
She was a determined follower of Mr.Warlock; what he said she believed, but here, too, there seemed to be no personal attachment.
She did not allow criticism of him in her own presence, but, on the other hand, she never spoke as though it would distress her very greatly to lose him.He was a sign, a symbol...If one symbol went another could be found.
To Martin she was the one out-standing proof of the reality of the Chapel.All the others--his sister, Miss Avies, Thurston, Crashaw, the Miss Cardinals, yes, and his father too, were, in one way or another, eccentric, abnormal, but Miss Pyncheon was the sane every-day world, the worldly world, the world of drinks and dinners, and banks and tobacconists, and yet she believed as profoundly as any of them.What did she believe? She was an Inside Saint, therefore she must have accepted this whole story of the Second Coming and the rest of it.Of course women would believe anything...
Nevertheless...
He scarcely listened to their chatter.He was forcing himself not to look at his sister, and yet Thurston's news seemed so extraordinary to him that his eye kept stealing round to her to see whether she were still the same.Could she have accepted him, that bounder and cad and charlatan? He felt a sudden cold chill of isolation as though in this world none of the ordinary laws were followed."By God, I am a stranger here," he thought.It was not until after dinner that night that he was alone with his father.He had resolved on many fine things in the interval.He was going to "have it out with him," "to put his foot down," "to tell him that such a thing as Thurston's marriage to his sister was perfectly impossible." And then, for the thousandth time since his return to England he felt strangely weak and irresolute.He did wish to be "firm" with his father, but it would have been so much easier to be firm had he not been so fond of him."Soft, sentimental weakness," he called it to himself, but he knew that it was something deeper than that, something that he would never be able to deny.