Priscilla's beauty was of that shadowy and spiritual kind that it took a good while to find out that she was a beauty at all. Certainly Priscilla's sisters, the Misses Mildmay, had sublime faith in Priscilla's charms; but the poor girl herself had spent so much of her twenty-five years of life trying to conform to the standard of behavior inculcated in the Misses Mildmay's boarding and day school for young ladies and little girls that it had robbed her of that delicious and ingenuous vanity which is the glorious inheritance of pretty young things of her gender. The Misses Mildmay lived in an imposing four-story brick mansion in a street of the sternest respectability; there was not a suspicion of the shop in the stately front door, and the heavily draped windows bore no advertising sign. The tall man-servant who opened the door was loftily oblivious to the pupils who sneaked in by the garden way. The Misses Mildmay had made money in their school--and it was all for Priscilla. Had this youngest birdling in the dove-cote been like her elder sisters, nothing could have been better contrived than the scheme of happiness proposed to her. But unfortunately Priscilla was no more a Mildmay than she was a Montmorency or a Condé. It is true that she conformed outwardly to the Mildmay model, but Nature's original Priscilla was a merry, fiery young creature with peachy cheeks and a perpetual smile and a good appetite. All these things, however, were kept in abeyance--particularly her color and her appetite. Had that dignified footman been cut up into juicy chops for Priscilla's breakfast, and that mahogany door been made into rich soups for Priscilla's dinner, she would no doubt have lost some of that pretty pallor, that pathetic look out of her dark eyes. But the income of the Misses Mildmay did not admit of the footman and the mahogany door and the juicy chops and rich soups too, so they skimped on the dinners, skimped on the amusements, skimped on all those vanities that had never had any charms for them, but which Mother Nature, who is obstinate as well as perverse, had meant for the younger sister.