Why was it that no man had chosen them? Gazing at their own reflections, they would tell themselves that they were not bad-looking--Jehane with her cloudy brown eyes and gipsy mane of night-black hair, Nan all blue and flaxen and fluffy. The years slipped by. Where was he in the world? For eight years, since she was seventeen, Jehane had never ceased watching. Every New Year and birthday she had whispered to herself, “Perhaps, by this time next year he will have come.” Marriage seemed to her the escape to every happiness. Now that she was twenty-five she grew desperate; from now on, with every day, her chance of being one of the chosen would diminish. As she expressed it to Nan, “We're two girls adrift on a raft and we can't swim. Over there's the land of marriage with all the little children, the homes and the husbands; we've no means of getting to it. Unless some of the men see us and put off in boats to our rescue, we'll be caught in the current of the years and swept out into the hunger of mid-ocean. But they're too busy to notice us. Oh, dear!” When Jehane spoke like this Nan would laugh; except for Jehane, no such thoughts would have entered her head. They didn't worry her when she was with her rector father at Cassingland, occupied with her quiet round of village-duties. In her heart of hearts she believed that life was planned by an unescapable Providence. Her placid philosophy irritated Jehane. She said that Nan's God was a stout widower in a clerical band; whereat Nan would smile dreamily and answer, “Wouldn't it be just ripping if God were?” At such times Jehane thought Nan stupid. That Jehane should have been so romantic about marriage was inexplicable, save on the ground that she voiced the passions which her parents had suppressed in themselves. Her father, Professor Benares Usk, was the greatest living Homeric scholar--a tall, bowed man with a broad beard that flowed down below his watch-chain, a bald and venerable egg-shaped head and a secret habit of taking snuff. He had lost interest in human doings since Greece was trampled by the Roman Eagles. Both he and Mrs. Usk were misty-eyed--they had frictioned off the corners of their personalities in the graveyards of the past; their minds were museums, stored with chipped splendors, the atmosphere of which was stuffy. Mrs. Usk was an authority on Scandinavian folk-lore--a thin, fine-featured, flat-breasted woman who wore her dresses straight up and down without a bulge. Her soft gray hair was drawn tightly off her forehead and twisted at the back into a hard, round walnut.