Hester Jennings, Mrs. Jennings's daughter, was the young art student like Rose's self, to whom she and her friends had naturally looked for congenial companionship where the girl was concerned; and if she did not find it with Hester, she was not likely to discover it in any of the other residents at No. 12 Welby Square. Naturally Rose did not greatly affect the remaining members of that elderly society, on which Mrs. Jennings professed to set store. She could not help liking Mrs. Jennings, though, alas! Rose scarcely believed in her so much as she would have been justified in doing.
In Mrs. Jennings's daughter, who had been from the first thought of as a friend for Rose, she believed entirely. Yet Rose had been in the beginning both startled by Hester Jennings and disappointed in her.
Hester Jennings looked considerably older than she was, which was about Annie Millar's age; in fact, she was prematurely worn with study and work. She was like her mother on a larger scale, with advantages of a fair paleness and remarkable violet-blue eyes, which Mrs. Jennings had never possessed. Hester might have passed for a lovely young woman if she had cared in the least to do it. But never was girl more indifferent to such claims or more capable of doing her worst to qualify them and render them the next thing to null and void. When Annie Millar made Hester Jennings's acquaintance, Annie maintained that there was something left out in Hester's composition, the part which makes a woman desire to look well in the eyes of her neighbours, and win admiration, though the admiration be as skin deep as the beauty which creates it.
To think that a daughter of Mrs. Jennings, an artist in her own right, could dress so badly, with such a careless contempt for patterns and colours, in such ill-fitting frocks and dowdy or grotesque hats! Her preference for strident aniline dyes and gigantic stripes and checks in the different articles of her costume looked very like perversity; especially when it was shown that with reference to other persons, in arranging to paint a portrait, for instance, no one, not Mrs. Jennings, displayed such a fine sense of fitness and harmony as Hester exhibited. Dress was to her, in her private character, mere necessary clothing, warm or cool as the season required. It was not worth the waste of thought implied by turning it over in her mind. Her mother dressed for the family; or, if she did not, Hester understood that her married sisters and sisters-in-law devoted, with success, a great deal of time which they did not value in other respects, to the subject in question.
Speak of Rose Millar's professional notions as to the human figure being left easy and untrammelled! Rose was a pattern of decorous neatness and trimness compared to Hester; indeed, Rose was appalled by the total absence of order and ceremony, not to say of embellishment, in her friend's toilet. Hester abandoned herself permanently to deshabilles. She appeared in a jacket indoors as well as out. She dispensed with collars in morning and lace in evening wear. She did her hair once when she got up, and regarded passing her hand over her head when she took off her hat as all that was incumbent upon her afterwards. Without intending it, and without dreaming of copying the bushes of hair in Rossetti's pictures, Hester Jennings's sandy-coloured locks, not a good point in her personal appearance, were, as her great-grandmother would have cried in horror, more like a dish-mop than anything else. She stopped short of dirt in her slovenliness because of her purity of soul, her deep respect for the laws of health, and because of the traditions of her class, from which she could not altogether escape. But between her bondage to work, and her scornful neglect of other claims which she had known over-exalted and exaggerated, she had accomplished marvels.
Hester Jennings had attained such eminence in her recklessness of consequences, that, in place of being a nearly lovely woman, in accordance with her profile, complexion, and glorious eyes, she was barely good-looking because of them, in a style which repulsed many more people than it attracted others. The sight of Hester was one of the numerous lessons which she was destined to give to Rose Millar. It frightened Rose into becoming tamely conventional and elaborately tidy in dress, to the surprise and edification of her sister Annie, for it was just at the time when Annie was most spent by her new life and labours, and least inclined to put off her hospital gown and cap.