racial distinction.  Lucia had taken nothing from them but what was beautiful and fine; hers was the deep-drawn unconscious beauty of the race; beauty of flesh and blood purified, spiritualized in its passage through the generations, beauty that gives the illusion of eternity, being both younger and older than the soul.  It was as if Nature had become Art in the making of Lucia, forming her by the subtlest processes of selection and rejection.

Having gone the round of the gallery, he paused before the modern portraits which brought him again to the door of the drawing-room.  Sir Frederick held him with his joyous satyr-face, for it was curiously, incredibly like his daughter’s (to be sure, Sir Frederick had blue eyes and reddish hair, which made a difference).  His eyebrows had a far-off hint of her; she lingered in the tilted corners of his mouth and eyes.  And if there could be any likeness between a thing so gross and a thing so spiritual, his upper lip took a sweep that suggested Lucia’s with its long-drawn subtle curve.

He was startled out of these reflections by the opening of the door.  Lucia stood beside him.  She had a lamp in her hand which she raised for an instant, so that the light fell full upon the portrait.  Her own face appeared as if illuminated from within by the flaming spirit of love.

“That is my father,” she said simply, and passed on.

He looked again at the portrait, but the likeness had vanished.  In the frank sensuality of Sir Frederick’s crimson smirk he could find no affinity to Lucia’s grave and tender smile.

“There are some things,” he said to himself, “that she could never see.”

CHAPTER XXV

If Lucia was not, as her father had pronounced her, the worst educated young woman in Europe, there was a sense (not intended by Sir Frederick) in which her education might be called incomplete.  She had learnt the things that she liked, and she had left unlearnt the things that she did not like.  It was the method of discreet skipping; and it answered so well in the world of books that she had applied it to the world of men and women.  She knew the people she liked, and she left unknown those whom she did not like.  Here in Harmouth her peculiar art or instinct of selection earned for her, as Kitty Palliser had lately told her, the character of exclusiveness.  This, by the way was family tradition again.  From time immemorial there had been a certain well-recognized distance between Court House and the little Georgian town.  And when Harmouth was discovered by a stock-broker and became a watering-place, and people began to talk about Harmouth society, Court House remained innocently unaware that anything of the sort existed.  Lucia selected her friends elsewhere with such supreme fastidiousness that she could count them on the fingers of one hand, her instinct, like all great natural gifts, being entirely spontaneous and unconscious.