For some years she was pretty, sang a little and obviously ‘thought more’ than either of her sisters. People listened then to her creed and believed in her intentions. She talked often of unselfishness, was always ready to do anything for anybody, and was always prevented or forestalled by less altruistic people. When, after her two offers of marriage, she stepped very quickly into the shapes and colours of an old maid, went to live with her sister-in-law and brother, and formed ‘habits’, people listened to her less readily. She herself however, quite unaware that at thirty-five, life for a woman is, sexually, either over or only just commencing, hoped to continue the illusions of her girlhood. The nobility of unselfishness appealed to her more than ever, but she found that the people around her were always standing in her way. She became, therefore, quite naturally, rather bitter. Her round figure expressed, in defiance of its rotundity, peevishness. She had to account for her failures in self-sacrificing altruism, and found it not in her own love of ease and dislike of effort, but, completely, in other people’s selfishness. Had she been permitted she would have been the finest Trenchard alive, and how fine that was only a Trenchard could know! But the world was in a conspiracy against her—the world, and especially her sister Elizabeth, whom she despised and bullied, but, somewhere in her strange suspicious crust of a heart, loved. That was, perhaps, the strangest thing about her—that, in spite of her ill-humour, discontents and irritations, she really loved the family, and would like to have told it so were she not continually prevented by its extraordinary habit of being irritating just when she felt most affectionate! She really did love them, and she would go down sometimes in the morning with every intention of saying so, but in five minutes they had destroyed that picture of herself which, during her absence from them, she had painted—for that, of course, she could not forgive them.