Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump.  She was fair and blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features, with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness.  I say mutinous, because Mrs. Thesiger’s way of being handsome was in revolt against her husband’s.  Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she encouraged its waving.  This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger’s appearance was frivolous.  But it was not.  All these florid plumpnesses and the upward curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger’s mouth.  Their intentions were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize with his.  Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity, the superior art of Mrs. Thesiger.

It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.

And she was, if anything, braver than her husband.  He could only just smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) I didn’t know.

And they—­the four daughters—­I’m not sure that they weren’t the most gallant of this gallant family.

I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents’ beauty that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features.  Not one of those five little faces was correct.  Victoria’s had tried hard for correctness in her father’s manner, but her mother’s irrepressible plumpness had made her miss it, poor girl, just as (I was soon to learn) she had missed everything.

Millicent’s face, the face of the one who had been at Girton, hadn’t tried for it; it had achieved a plainness I admired because it was oddly like Viola’s face, only that Millicent was sallow and thin and dry and wore pince-nez.

Mildred, the nurse, was frankly plump and fair and florid like her mother; her face would have been pretty if her father’s nose hadn’t stepped in and struggled with her mother’s and so spoilt it for her.

Norah, the youngest, was pretty—­and odd.  She was Viola all over again, but more slender and coloured differently, coloured all wrong.  I didn’t take to Norah all at once.  I wasn’t prepared for a Viola with blue eyes and pink cheeks and light hair, and the figure of a young foal.  Besides, her hair was outrageous; it waved too much; it was all crinkles, and she hadn’t found out yet how to keep it tidy.

She told me afterwards it was “up” that evening for the first time.  When it came to her turn, she said:  “There are such a dreadful lot of us, aren’t there?”