Christine was attractive, though, in the Pierrot style. Her black hair was cut smooth and round to her head as the top of a penny bun. The lashes of her big brown eyes curled up inquiringly, and so did her ridiculously short soft nose of which the three-cornered nostrils lay almost flat to her face. A very long upper lip lent her expression an air of incredibly droll roguery. Her rounded cheeks were scarlet with excitement, but dimmed by the powdery bloom which dims and transfigures very ripe fruit and very young cherubim. A round curling mouth and a round babyish chin completed the resemblance to a Pierrot who pleads sometimes in the moonlight for love--and sometimes crudely on the pier for pennies. In fact, there was quite a lot of the pier about Christine. But: “Help!” thought Ursula, “I’m going to like her!” With which brief expostulation of horror, she sat down to watch the tragi-comedy she had with such reckless lordliness prepared for herself. It all happened quite amusingly. For within a few hours Doug capitulated; and Ursula, tranquilly studying him, was able to mark exactly how many days later he acknowledged the truth to himself. Roughly, about five. He concealed his fall from Ursula, of course; and successfully, he had not a doubt. But his long period of immunity from romantic episode had doubled its present intensity, so that he believed as never before it was _the_ romantic episode, and he had to curb himself from shouting robust oaths at Ursula, who alone stood between him and the lagoons, etc., with Christine. Christine had no chance of resistance from the very beginning. Boarding-house life, and a mysterious wave of feeling called “the modern tendency,” had weakened the tradition which used to exist for the protection of maidens of eighteen from foolishness, that a married man was “no good.” And Doug, bare-throated, and with hefty brown knees, was surely large and splendid as never man had been before. “How funny I never noticed him at the boarding-house!” And as it happened, that little shut-off white room which overhung the sea was “sort of perfect” in which to spend nights with a tremulous coloured dream.... At the boarding-house Christine shared a room with her aunt. But here---- The world glowed and was strange ... “as though some one had turned it over on to its right side,” murmured Christine, glad, nevertheless, that her friend Gladys Willoughby, who was scornful and disillusioned and a cynic and used lip-salve (Ursula was right), could not know she was making an idiot fool of herself--enjoying being alone with the thin banjo note of the cricket in the grass below her window. “I’m right and Gladys is wrong!” Christine discovered ... and was happier still.