Her hungry eyes, gazing at Bianca, had in them the aspirations of all Nonconformity.
Bianca pencilled on her card:
“If you can come to my father to-day or tomorrow, please do.”
“Will you give her this, please? It will be quite enough.”
“I'll give it her,” the landlady said; “she'll be glad of it, I daresay. I see her sitting here. Girls like that, if they've got nothing to do—see, she's been moping on her bed....”
The impress of a form was, indeed, clearly visible on the red and yellow tasselled tapestry of the bed.
Bianca cast a look at it.
“Thank you,” she said; “good day.”
With the jabbed nerve aching badly she came slowly homewards.
Before the garden gate the little model herself was gazing at the house, as if she had been there some time. Approaching from across the road, Bianca had an admirable view of that young figure, now very trim and neat, yet with something in its lines—more supple, perhaps, but less refined—which proclaimed her not a lady; a something fundamentally undisciplined or disciplined by the material facts of life alone, rather than by a secret creed of voluntary rules. It showed here and there in ways women alone could understand; above all, in the way her eyes looked out on that house which she was clearly longing to enter. Not 'Shall I go in?' was in that look, but 'Dare I go in?'