But the daughter remained as indifferent to taunts as she had been to my friendly advances. It occurred to me now that her self-possession was remarkable. It was little short of threatening if one regarded her too closely. I wondered if this could really be an inheritance from her well-nerved father or the result of her years as teacher in a finishing school for young ladies. I was tempted to suspect the latter, for, physically, the creature was by no means formidable. Perhaps an inch or two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a _completed_ slenderness, I might say--a slenderness so palpably finished as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme. It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming, that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would admit. Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but patently disparage me at this moment. I was by no means an unfinished young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that behind; the moment was one wherein relaxation would have been not only graceful but entirely safe, for she was in no manner to be held accountable for my conduct. Yet again and again her curious reserve congealed me back upon the stanch regard of Miss Caroline. My passion for that sprightly dame and her gracious acceptance of it were happily not to deteriorate under the regard of any possible daughter, however egregiously might we flaunt to her trained eye our need to be "finished." The newcomer's reserve was indeed pregnable to no assault I could devise. Not even did she lighten when I said to her mother, in open mockery of that reserve, "Well, she cost you a lot of furniture that was really most companionable about the house," and paused with a sigh betokening a regretful comparison of values. That lance shattered against her Lansdale shield like all the others. Ending my call, I felt vividly what I have elsewhere seen described as "the cosmic chill". The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in lavish abundance. I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly when I was able to shape their destinies. Thrice I lost interestingly and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit. Even after that I must have recourse to the wonted philter to bring sleep, the face of my vision being unaccountably the face of the true Little Miss before she had evolved into Miss Lansdale of the threatening self-possession. I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.