Lensky smiled at her, and on his strangely white, shrewd, worldly-wise
face the smile looked like a sudden flash of sunlight. "Yes, she _is_
without a doubt very beautiful, but----"
"'But'?"
"I think she is taking her trouble the wrong way. She is bearing it
without grinning, and the grinning is to my mind the greater half."
"But remember what her surroundings at home are, Jack. She had had no
discipline whatever; her mother is horrid----"
Lensky did not answer. Somehow he never cared to hold forth on the
subject of mothers to his wife.
And then, thin, erect, light-footed, Pam went out from the house in
which her strange childhood had been lived, and turning to her left
passed down the dangerously mossy marble steps, and into the olive
grove.