Mariella on the other hand--how she used to sit with her clear light eyes blank, and her polite cool little treble saying: ‘Yes, Miss Pim,’ ‘No, Miss Pim,’--and never be interested and never understand! She wrote like a child of six. She would not progress. And yet, as Miss Pim said, Mariella was by no means what you’d call a stupid girl.... By no means a stupid girl: thrilling to Judith. Apart from the thrill which her own queerness gave, she had upon her the reflected glory of the four boy-cousins who came for the holidays,--Julian, Charlie, Martin and Roddy. Now they were all grown up. Would they come back when Mariella came? And would they remember Judith at all, and be glad to see her again? She knew that, anyway, they would not remember so meticulously, so achingly as herself: people never did remember her so hard as she remembered them,--their faces especially. In earliest childhood it was plain that nobody else realized the wonder, the portentous mystery of faces. Some patterns were so pure, so clear and lovely you could go on looking at them for ever. Charlie’s and Marietta’s were like that. It was odd that the same bits of face shaped and arranged a little differently gave such deplorable results. Julian was the ugly one. And sometimes the ugliest faces did things that were suddenly lovely. Julian’s did. You dared not take eyes off a stranger’s face for fear of missing a change in it. ‘My dear! How your funny little girl stares. She makes me quite uncomfortable.’ ‘Don’t worry, my dear. She doesn’t even see you. Always in the clouds.’ The stupids went on stupidly chattering. They little knew about faces. They little knew what a fearful thing could happen to a familiar face--Miss Pim’s for instance--surprised off its guard and broken up utterly into grossness, withered into hatred or cunning; or what a mystery it was to see a face day after day and find it always strange and surprising. Roddy’s was that sort, though at first it had seemed quite dull and flat. It had some secret in it. At night in bed she invented faces, putting the pieces together till suddenly there they were!--quite clear. They had names and vague sorts of bodies and lived independent lives inside her head. Often they turned out to have a likeness to Roddy. The truth was, Judith thought now, Roddy’s was a dream rather than a real face. She felt she had never seen it as it actually was, but always with that overstressed significance, that haunting quality of curiousness which a face in a dream bears.