“You know, she looks rather like the Blue Boy, doesn’t she?” said Jerry. “Only his eyes aren’t blue, and he has a gentler face. Alix’s face is rather _farouche_;—is that the word?—You frighten me a little, Alix, with those cold blue eyes of yours.—Marigold’s still in bed. She sent for me to see her just now. Writing letters,” said Jerry, “in a most adorable little cap; a Watteau little cap; most frightfully becoming. That was why she sent for me, of course, so that I should see her in it; though the alleged motive was the Fairlies’ ball.” “Naughty Jerry,” smiled his mother. “Not a bit naughty. I told her I saw through her. I told her that the cap was a brilliant success. Nothing _souterrain_ about me.—Eh, Alix? Is that right?” They all called her Alix;—as if she had been ten years old; or as if they had always known her. “I think you must try to talk a little French with Alix,” said Lady Mary. “His accent is good, isn’t it? But his verbs and genders are dreadful, and _souterrain_ isn’t right, my dear boy.” “Don’t you think Marigold quite extraordinarily beautiful?” Jerry inquired. “Isn’t the colour of her hair and eyes a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale colour?” “But she is much more like a Watteau than like a fairy-tale,” said Alix. “But Watteau people are fairy-tale people.—You mean she’s an artificial fairy-tale.—Yes, I see what you mean.—And it’s really more Fragonard than Watteau, too—‘A dainty rogue in porcelain,’ that’s what she is. Do you read Meredith? I love him, though I know he is _démodé_ just now.” But Alix had not read Meredith. Half an hour later, when Jerry had lightly hoisted her to the saddle and the groom had released the chestnut’s eager head, Alix felt as if, at last, she had discovered her true vocation. This—yes, even more than dancing—was what she had been made for. She did not feel that she had anything to learn. She felt no fear. Her hands went easily where Jerry told her to put them; her knee and foot found their security. Nothing this delicious creature could do, moving with satin ease and steel strength beneath her, would take her unawares. She understood him, and he, his gentle ears quivering at the sound of her voice, understood her. “Yes; yes, I see,” she said, as Jerry gave his explanations. “Yes, we will walk to the end so that I shall be quite used to it and then canter on the turf. Yes; I understand; holding with my knee.” It was not swimming, or dancing, or flying, but it combined the delights of all three. One floated, buoyantly sustained; one embodied the beauty of rhythmic movement; one glided at a height strange enough for a sense of slight, delicious trembling. The earth was new, seen from this height; one looked into the branches of the beeches at the level where the chaffinches were perching and flitting. “You sit as if you were born to it,” Jerry told her, and she replied that her father had been a great horseman.