Miss Tremont shook her head. “I don’t approve of all Hal does—she pads. She doesn’t seem to care much who knows it, for when the weather’s very warm she takes them out, right before your eyes, so it isn’t so bad as if she were deceitful about it. Here is Beverly.” Patience looked long at the young man’s face. This face too was oval, with a high intellectual forehead, broad black brows, and very regular features. The mouth appeared to pout beneath the drooping moustache. The expression of the eyes was very sweet. It was a strong handsome face, high-bred like the others, but with a certain nobility lacking in the women. “He is said to be the handsomest young man in Westchester County, and he’s quite dark,” said Miss Tremont. “What do you think of him?” “He is rather handsome. Where is Honora?” “She never has pictures taken. But, dear me, I must go out and see Ellen.” Patience disposed the photographs on the mantel, then, leaning on her elbows, gazed upon Beverly Peele. The Composite, Byron, the Stranger, rattled their bones unheard. She concluded that no knight of olden time could ever have been so wholly satisfactory as this young man. Romance, who had been boxed about the ears, and sent to sleep, crept to her old throne with a sly and meaning smile. Patience began at once to imagine her meeting with Beverly Peele. She would be in a runaway carriage, and he would rescue her. She would be skating and fall in a hole, and he would pull her out. He would be riding to hounds in his beautiful pink coat (which was red) and run over her. She pictured his face with a variety of expressions. She was sure that he had the courage of a lion and the tenderness of some women. Unquestionably he had read his ancestors’ entire library—“with that forehead,”—and he probably had the high and mighty air of her favourite heroes of fiction. In one of her letters Miss Tremont had remarked that he loved children and animals; therefore he had a beautiful character and a kind heart. And she was glad to have heard that he also had a temper: it saved him from being a prig. Altogether, Patience, with the wisdom of sixteen and three quarters, was quite convinced that she had found her ideal, and overlooked its extreme unlikeness to the Composite, which was the only ideal she had ever created. A woman’s ideal is the man she is in love with for the time being. She went up to her room, and for the first time in her life critically examined herself in the mirror. With May Peele and one or two beauties of the High School in mind, she decided with a sigh that _she_ was no beauty.