The key to Rhoda at this period was a desire to be made warm with praise of her person.  She beheld her face at times, and shivered.  The face was so strange with its dark thick eyebrows, and peculiarly straight-gazing brown eyes; the level long red under-lip and curved upper; and the chin and nose, so unlike Dahlia’s, whose nose was, after a little dip from the forehead, one soft line to its extremity, and whose chin seemed shaped to a cup.  Rhoda’s outlines were harder.  There was a suspicion of a heavenward turn to her nose, and of squareness to her chin.  Her face, when studied, inspired in its owner’s mind a doubt of her being even nice to the eye, though she knew that in exercise, and when smitten by a blush, brightness and colour aided her claims.  She knew also that her head was easily poised on her neck; and that her figure was reasonably good; but all this was unconfirmed knowledge, quickly shadowed by the doubt.  As the sun is wanted to glorify the right features of a landscape, this girl thirsted for a dose of golden flattery.  She felt, without envy of her sister, that Dahlia eclipsed her:  and all she prayed for was that she might not be quite so much in the background and obscure.

But great, powerful London—­the new universe to her spirit—­was opening its arms to her.  In her half sleep that night she heard the mighty thunder of the city, crashing, tumults of disordered harmonies, and the splendour of the lamp-lighted city appeared to hang up under a dark-blue heaven, removed from earth, like a fresh planet to which she was being beckoned.

At breakfast on the Sunday morning, her departure was necessarily spoken of in public.  Robert talked to her exactly as he had talked to Dahlia, on the like occasion.  He mentioned, as she remembered in one or two instances, the names of the same streets, and professed a similar anxiety as regarded driving her to the station and catching the train.  “That’s a thing which makes a man feel his strength’s nothing,” he said.  “You can’t stop it.  I fancy I could stop a four-in-hand at full gallop.  Mind, I only fancy I could; but when you come to do with iron and steam, I feel like a baby.  You can’t stop trains.”

“You can trip ’em,” said Anthony, a remark that called forth general laughter, and increased the impression that he was a man of resources.

Rhoda was vexed by Robert’s devotion to his strength.  She was going, and wished to go, but she wished to be regretted as well; and she looked at him more.  He, on the contrary, scarcely looked at her at all.  He threw verbal turnips, oats, oxen, poultry, and every possible melancholy matter-of-fact thing, about the table, described the farm and his fondness for it and the neighbourhood; said a farmer’s life was best, and gave Rhoda a week in which to be tired of London.

She sneered in her soul, thinking “how little he knows of the constancy in the nature of women!” adding, “when they form attachments.”