Janet was tall, and possessed what the people at the shop called “a lovely figure;” the mantles and jackets never looked so well as upon her. The habit of putting these garments on, and making a little parade in front of the glass to show them, which was her daily duty, had given a certain ease of carriage not usual in her class. When you are accustomed to be gazed at, whether for yourself, or what you carry on your shoulders, it takes away the native embarrassment of the self-conscious creature. She was dressed in that gown of black alpaca which is the uniform of the shops, and which did full justice to the fine lines of her form. These were not the mere slim outlines of a girlish figure which might turn to anything, but really beautiful, finely proportioned, and imposing. She came down into her father’s shop, into the line of sunshine that crossed it, with the air of a young queen. Her face, however, was not so fine. She was pale, her nose not quite so delicate, her mouth not so small as beauty demanded. Her hair was fair, with little colour in it, and affording but little relief to the forehead upon which it clustered in a wild but careful disorder, according to the fashion of the time. Lady Markham took in every line and every feature as the girl advanced: far more critically than if she had been, as Janet thought, an intending employer did she examine this new unknown being who (was it possible?) had Paul’s future in her hands. They gazed at each other, forgetting the man who stood by watching their mutual interest with what would have been amusement had he been less indignant and curious. Men and women are always so strange to each other. He looked at these two with a half-despairing, half-comic (notwithstanding his seriousness) consciousness that the ideas that were going through their minds were to him a sealed book. He did not know, poor man, that the lady, who was a stranger, was the one of the two that was comprehensible to him, and that stranger than all Greek or Latin, more mysterious than philosophy, would have been to him, had he been able to see them, the thoughts in the mind of his own child. “I want to ask you a question, Janet. Don’t be alarmed, it is not anything to frighten you,” he said. “In the first place this is Lady Markham, the mother of Mr. Markham whom you have so often seen here.”