figure was slight and of middle stature, her features small,
her eyes tolerable, and her complexion sallow, had nevertheless a certain mental
superiority which could not be explained away - an exasperating thoroughness in
her musical accomplishment, a fastidious discrimination in her general tastes,
which made it impossible to force her admiration and kept you in awe of her
standard. This insignificant-looking young lady of four-and-twenty, whom any
one's eyes would have passed over negligently if she had not been Miss
Arrowpoint, might be suspected of a secret opinion that Miss Harleth's
acquirements were rather of a common order; and such an opinion was not made
agreeable to think of by being always veiled under a perfect kindness of manner.
    But Gwendolen did not like to dwell on facts which threw an unfavourable
light on herself. The musical Magus who had so suddenly widened her horizon was
not always on the scene; and his being constantly backwards and forwards between
London and Quetcham soon began to be thought of as offering opportunities for
converting him to a more admiring state of mind. Meanwhile, in the manifest
pleasure her singing gave at Brackenshaw Castle, the Firs, and elsewhere, she
recovered her equanimity, being disposed to think approval more trustworthy than
objection, and not being one of the exceptional persons who have a parching
thirst for a perfection undemanded by their neighbours. Perhaps it would have
been rash to say then that she was at all exceptional inwardly, or that the
unusual in her was more than her rare grace of movement and bearing, and a
certain daring which gave piquancy to a very common egoistic ambition, such as
exists under many clumsy exteriors and is taken no notice of. For I suppose that
the set of the head does not really determine the hunger of the inner self for
supremacy: it only makes a difference sometimes as to the way in which the
supremacy is held attainable, and a little also to the degree in which it can be
attained; especially when the hungry one is a girl, whose passion for doing what
is remarkable has an ideal limit in consistency with the highest breeding and
perfect freedom from the sordid need of income. Gwendolen was as inwardly
rebellious against the restraints of family conditions, and as ready to look
through obligations into her own fundamental want of feeling for them, as if she
had been sustained by the boldest speculations; but she really had no such
speculations, and would at once have marked herself off from any sort of
theoretical or practically reforming women by satirising them. She rejoiced to
feel herself exceptional; but her horizon was that of the genteel romance where
the