Personalities always appeal to her, until they are directed against herself. But it is a part of her curious pathos that she never really expects them to be directed against herself. I looked at Mary Ambrey, and she looked back at me with the faintest hint of resigned amusement in her hazel eyes.
Just as Martyn had finished distributing pencils and strips of paper the Misses Kendal were announced.
It was the twins, Dolly and Aileen.
They wear their hats on the backs of their heads, and their skirts a little longer behind than in front, as do all the Kendals, but they are nice-looking girls in a bovine way. It is hard on them to compare them with Sallie, who is ten years their junior, as slim and as straight as a wand, and whose clothes invariably produce a peculiarly dashing effect.
No Kendals are ever dashing.
“You’re just in time to learn a new game,” said Martyn, proceeding to explain.
“We’re no good at this sort of thing,” said the Kendals, with cheerful contempt for those who were.
“We shall be thoroughly out of it all, but we’ll try and struggle along somehow.”
The Kendal reaction to life is a mixture of self-depreciation, self-assertion, and a thorough-going, entirely unvenomous pessimism in regard to past, present, and future. There are four sisters, and one brother, who is always spoken of by his family as “poor old Ahlfred.”
Inquiries after Alfred, who is in business and comes home only for week-ends, always elicit the assurance that he is “struggling along somehow.”