“Sophia!” she breathed, with an intensity of alarm that merged into condoning admiration.  “Whatever will you do next?”

Sophia’s lovely flushed face crowned the extraordinary structure like a blossom, scarcely controlling its laughter.  She was as tall as her mother, and as imperious, as crested, and proud; and in spite of the pigtail, the girlish semi-circular comb, and the loose foal-like limbs, she could support as well as her mother the majesty of the gimp-embroidered dress.  Her eyes sparkled with all the challenges of the untried virgin as she minced about the showroom.  Abounding life inspired her movements.  The confident and fierce joy of youth shone on her brow.  “What thing on earth equals me?” she seemed to demand with enchanting and yet ruthless arrogance.  She was the daughter of a respected, bedridden draper in an insignificant town, lost in the central labyrinth of England, if you like; yet what manner of man, confronted with her, would or could have denied her naive claim to dominion?  She stood, in her mother’s hoops, for the desire of the world.  And in the innocence of her soul she knew it!  The heart of a young girl mysteriously speaks and tells her of her power long ere she can use her power.  If she can find nothing else to subdue, you may catch her in the early years subduing a gate-post or drawing homage from an empty chair.  Sophia’s experimental victim was Constance, with suspended needle and soft glance that shot out from the lowered face.

Then Sophia fell, in stepping backwards; the pyramid was overbalanced; great distended rings of silk trembled and swayed gigantically on the floor, and Sophia’s small feet lay like the feet of a doll on the rim of the largest circle, which curved and arched above them like a cavern’s mouth.  The abrupt transition of her features from assured pride to ludicrous astonishment and alarm was comical enough to have sent into wild uncharitable laughter any creature less humane than Constance.  But Constance sprang to her, a single embodied instinct of benevolence, with her snub nose, and tried to raise her.

“Oh, Sophia!” she cried compassionately—­that voice seemed not to know the tones of reproof—­“I do hope you’ve not messed it, because mother would be so—­”

The words were interrupted by the sound of groans beyond the door leading to the bedrooms.  The groans, indicating direst physical torment, grew louder.  The two girls stared, wonder-struck and afraid, at the door, Sophia with her dark head raised, and Constance with her arms round Sophia’s waist.  The door opened, letting in a much-magnified sound of groans, and there entered a youngish, undersized man, who was frantically clutching his head in his hands and contorting all the muscles of his face.  On perceiving the sculptural group of two prone, interlocked girls, one enveloped in a crinoline, and the other with a wool-work bunch of flowers pinned to her knee, he jumped back, ceased groaning, arranged his face, and seriously tried to pretend that it was not he who had been vocal in anguish, that, indeed, he was just passing as a casual, ordinary wayfarer through the showroom to the shop below.  He blushed darkly; and the girls also blushed.