She turned away and, walking down another little path threaded through the rocks, she stood at the entrance to the bridge and watched people on foot, people on bicycles, people in carts coming and going over it. She could not cross herself for she had not a penny in her pocket, but she stood there gazing and sometimes looking down at the road two hundred feet below. This made her slightly giddy and the people down there had too much the appearance of pigmies with legs growing from their necks, going about perfectly unimportant business with a great deal of fuss. It was pleasanter to see these country people in their carts, school-girls with plaits down their backs, rosy children in perambulators and an exceedingly handsome man on a fine black horse, a fair man, bronzed like a soldier, riding as though he had done it all his life. She looked at him with admiration for his looks and envy for his possessions, for that horse, that somewhat sulky ease. And it was quite possible that he was an acquaintance of her aunts! She laughed away her awed astonishment. Why, her own father had been such as he, though she had never seen him on a horse. She had, after all, to adjust her views a little, to remember that she was a Mallett, a member of an honoured Radstowe family, the granddaughter of a General, the daughter of a gentleman, though a scamp. She was ashamed of the something approaching reverence with which she had looked at the man on the horse, but she was also ashamed of her shame; in fact, to be ashamed at all was, she felt, a degradation, and she cast the feeling from her. Here was not only a new world but a new life, a new starting point; she must be equal to the place, the opportunity and the occasion; she was, she told herself, equal to them all. In this self-confident mood she returned to Nelson Lodge and found Caroline, in a different frock, seated behind the tea-table and in the act of putting the tea into the pot. “Just in time,” she remarked, and added with intense interest, “You have brushed back your hair. Excellent! Look, Sophia, what an improvement! And more like Reginald than ever. Take off your hat, child, and let us see. My dear, I was going to tell you, when I knew you better, that those curls made you look like an organ-grinder. Don’t hush me, Sophia; I always say what I think.” Henrietta was hurt; this, though Caroline did not know it, was a rebuff to the mother who loved the curls; but the daughter would not betray her sensibility, and as Rose was not present she dared to say, “An organ-grinder with square feet.”