A clever, strange, charming child Barry found her, old and young beyond her twenty years.  Her wide-set blue eyes seemed to see horizons, and too often to be blind to foregrounds.  She had a slow, deliberating habit of work, and of some things was astonishingly ignorant, with the ignorance of those who, when at school, have worked at what they preferred and quietly disregarded the rest.  If he let her compose a letter, its wording would be quaint.  Her prose was, in fact, worse than her verse, and that was saying a good deal.  But she was thorough, never slipshod.  Her brain ground slowly, but it ground exceeding small; there were no blurred edges to her apprehension of facts; either she didn’t know a thing or she did, and that sharp and clear distinction is none too common.  She would file and index papers with precision, and find them again, slow and sure, when they were required.  Added to these secretarial gifts, such as they were, she had vision; she saw always the dream through or in spite of the business; she was like Barry himself in that.  She was a good companion, too, though she had no wit and not very much humour, and none of Nan’s gifts of keen verbal brilliance, frequent ribaldry and quick response; she would digest an idea slowly, and did not make jokes; her clear mind had the quality of a crystal rather than of a flashing diamond.  The rising generation; the woman citizen of to-morrow:  what did not rest on her, and what might she not do and be?  Nan, on the other hand, was the woman citizen of to-day.  And Nan did not bother to use her vote because she found all the parties and all the candidates about equally absurd.  Barry had argued with Nan about that, but made no impression on her cynical indifference; she had met him with levity.  To Gerda there was a wrong and a right in politics, instead of only a lot of wrongs; touching young faith, Nan called it, but Barry, who shared it, found it cheering.

This pretty little white pixyish person, with her yellow hair cut straight across her forehead and waving round her neck like the curled, shining petals of a celandine, with her straight-thinking mind and her queer, secret, mystic thoughts—­she was the woman of the future, a citizen and a mother of citizens.  She and the other girls and boys were out to build the new heaven and the new earth, and their children would carry it on.  This responsibility of Gerda’s invested her with a special interest in the eyes of Barry, who lived and worked for the future, and who, when he saw an infant mewling and puking in a pram, was apt to think “The hope for the world,” and smile at it encouragingly, overlooking its present foolishness of aspect and habit.  If ever he had children ... if Nan would marry him ... but Nan would always lightly slide away when he got near her....  He could see her now, with the cool, amused smile tilting her lips, always sliding away, eluding him....  Nan, like a wild animal for grace, brilliant like blown fire, cool like the wind, stabbing herself and him with her keen wit....