"My little Lily is getting quite a grown-up girl, now. It's quite a duty for little people to take care of their complexions, you know, we're given these small advantages to be a pleasure to those who care about our looks."
Lily had thereby deduced that Philip was afraid of her becoming vain, and that therefore he, also, thought her pretty.
She sometimes took long and furtive observations of herself in the glass. Her eyes, dark-lashed and rather deeply set, were not nearly as blue as Dorothy Hardinge's, but her nose at least was straight where Dorothy's turned up, and her soft skin had no freckles, and was sun-burned olive instead of red. She thought that her lips were too full, but at all events they were firmly closed, since she had always breathed through her nose, which not one of the three Hardinges could do for any length of time. And her hair was lovely.
Lily would never have applied to it, even in her own mind, such an adjective—redolent of vanity, according to the code—but nevertheless, that was what she really thought of it, when she brushed out the long, silky brown waves.
She counted vanity as being amongst her besetting sins, and strove to persuade herself that, against the evidence of her own senses, she really ought to believe herself plain and unattractive.
It was a mark of her own unregeneracy, that this should prove to be so extraordinarily difficult.
It became more difficult than ever, when Colin Eastwood and Lily began to meet one another every day at the parties and excursions arranged by the Hardinges in honour of their two guests.
Colin, as Dorothy had said, was nice, and very quiet. The indications of his admiration for Lily were so shyly offered that she only became aware of it by subtle and gradual degrees.
So restrained and delicate was that impalpable idyll of their extreme youth, that it never became the object of jarring and facetious comment, as was Dorothy's loud flirtation with Colin's cheerful and amusing friend, embarked upon within an hour of their first acquaintance.
Lily, at first, had indeed been inwardly mortified at the promptness of Dorothy's conquest. The undergraduate was a Real Live Person—so was Dorothy. So were all the others. Lily, just as at school, felt herself to be but an indifferent masquerader, through the badly sustained pretensions of whom they could all see plainly.