Somewhere in the past was there some strain of southern blood which might account for her?
He remembered a beautiful Greek girl at an Oxford Commemoration, when he had last attended that function; the daughter of a Greek financier settled in London, whose still lovely mother had been drawn and painted interminably by the Burne Jones and William Morris group of artists.

_She_ was on a larger scale than Mrs.
Sarratt, but the colour of the flesh was the same--as though light shone through alabaster--and the sweetness of the deep-set eyes.

Moreover she had produced much the same effect on the bystander, as of a child of nature, a creature of impulse and passion--passion, clinging and self-devoted, not fierce and possessive--through all the more superficial suggestions of reticence and self-control.

'This little creature is only at the beginning of her life'-- he thought, with a kind of pity for her very softness and exquisiteness.

'What the deuce will she have made of it, by the end?
Why should such beings grow old ?' His interest in her led him gradually to other thoughts--partly disagreeable, partly philosophical.