had fallen in love with this tall, laughing, golden-haired girl, while Lucia, from an attitude of tacit tolerance toward her admiration, had soon come to lean upon it, and to give in exchange the affection of which she was capable. If she felt unwell or depressed, it was always a solid comfort to have Maud in whom to confide her aches or cloudiness of spirit, and Maud's quiet and imperturbable serenity was better than smelling-salts or phenacetin. Or if (depression being rare with her) exuberance, like a hose, demanded something to squirt at, Maud's glow of sympathetic delight in her ecstatic vitality was equally satisfying. And thus the fact of the mutual attraction of unlikes was illustrated; the two girls, by the very fact of their polar dissimilitude, were closer friends than any similarity of nature would have caused them to be. Between them they completed the spirit of girlhood; fused into one, they would have formed the incarnation of womanhood. But Nature, in her inscrutable ways, is wont to pluck her incarnation in two; she gives the complement of certain adorable qualities to another person. The two halves of the ideal, however, usually find a certain consolation in these imperfections, and in the present instance a friendship almost ideal resulted from them. For the selfishness of the one was healed by the self-abandonment of the other, and what Lucia would have called the seriousness of Maud was lit by her own vivacity.
Maud arrived quickly at the hair-brushing stage of undressing, and went to her friend's room. But Lucia had been, as was her custom, the quicker of the two, and was standing in front of her glass playing conjuring tricks, as was Maud's phrase for these operations, with her hair. For it seemed part and parcel of her lambent vitality that her very hair should be full not only of the pale gold flames of its colouring, but that authentic fire should burn in it. And now, as she stood before her glass, lightly brushing it, it stood out from her head in soft billows of gold, each hair asserting itself, not lying close with the rest, but alive and individual. Her small, pale, oval face, still strangely sexless in spite of her twenty years, and more like the face of some young boy than of a girl on the threshold of womanhood, lay like a flushed jewel in the casket of its gold, a jewel to ravish the eyes and trouble the soul of the sanest. She had put on a dressing-gown of grey silk, with short arms reaching barely to her elbows, and the neutrality of its colour heightened by contrast her pale, brilliant colouring.
