She had been pretty at eighteen, she was beautiful now, beautiful in the real sense of that terribly abused word, because she aroused interest as well as admiration in the beholder. The questions asked about her would be always different ones, depending for their impulse on the private instincts and desires of the individual.
Her eyes were large, dark, her figure slender, her colouring fair, her hair (she had a mass of it) dark brown with some shadow of dull gold in its threads, her neck and shoulders lovely with a pure healthy whiteness of colour and form that only youth could give her, her chin strong and determined but not exaggerated—all this catalogue is useless. Her beauty did not lie in these things, but in the vitality, the freedom, the humour, the wildness of her spirit. Her eyes, the dimple in her cheek, the high, clear forehead spoke of kindness, generosity, love of her fellowmen, but it was the quality behind those things, the quality of a soul absolutely free and independent but not selfish, open-minded and honest but neither dogmatic nor impertinent, young and ignorant perhaps but ready for any discovery, fearless and excited but tender and soft-hearted, unsentimental but loyal-hearted, that finally told. Although her means were so slender she dressed admirably, liking bright colours, crimson and purple and orange, but never looking so well as when she was in the simplest black.
She knew everything about dress by natural instinct, could make clothes out of nothing at all (not so difficult in 1920), was able to buy things in the cheapest way at the smartest shops, and really spent less time and thought over all these things than most of the clumsily dressed girls of her acquaintance. She was always neat; her gloves and her shoes and her stockings were as fine as those of any lady in the land. She was never extravagant in the fashion of the moment nor was she outside it; when women of sixty wore skirts that belonged more properly to their granddaughters, she who might with pride have been short-skirted was not.
And, just at this time, she was so happy that it made you afraid to watch her. Mary Cass, her friend, was often afraid.
Miss Cass was five years older than Millicent and had seen a great deal of life. She had driven an ambulance in France, and it was afterwards, when nursing in a hospital in Boulogne, that she and Millicent had made friends. She had nursed with the same quiet capacity with which she had driven her ambulance, and now she was studying at the Women's College of Medicine and at the end of her five years' course was going to be one of the most efficient women surgeons in Europe. That was what she set in front of her, and the things that she set in front of her she obtained. She was a little, insignificant, mild-eyed mouse of a woman with a very determined chin; she had none of Millicent's gaiety and wild zest for life. Life seemed to her rather a poor thing at best; she had no great expectations of it, but, on the other hand, bore no one a grudge because she was in the midst of it. So long as she was working at something she was happy; she was fond of Millicent but not extravagant about her.
Her work was more to her than any human being, and she would have liked Millicent to look on work with a deeper seriousness. This was their one deep difference of opinion, that to Mary Cass work was more than human nature and that to Millicent people were everything. "I'd rather live with people I love than write the greatest book in the world," Millicent said. "I believe, Mary, that you only make a friend because you hope one day to be able to cut his or her leg off."
"I'd do it very nicely," said Mary gravely.
There was a further little trouble between them that Mary was rather impatient of Henry. She thought him untidy, careless, inaccurate, clumsy and sentimental; he was undoubtedly all of these things—Millicent, of course, adored Henry and would not hear a word against him from anybody.
"He's only careless because he's a genius," she said.
"When's he going to begin his genius?" asked Mary. "He's twenty-six now."