... She's eighteen--?
But I will talk to her...."
(10)
All our children are changelings. They are perpetually fresh strangers.
Every day they vanish and a new person masquerades as yesterday's child
until some unexpected development betrays the cheat.
The bishop had still to learn this perennial newness of the young. He
learnt it in half an hour at the end of a fatiguing day.
He went into the dining-room. He went in as carelessly as possible and
smoking a cigarette. He had an honourable dread of being portentous in
his family; almost ostentatiously he laid the bishop aside. Eleanor had
finished her meal, and was sitting in the arm-chair by the fire with one
hand holding her sprained wrist.
"Well," he said, and strolled to the hearthrug. He had had an odd idea
that he would find her still dirty, torn, and tearful, as her mother had
described her, a little girl in a scrape. But she had changed into
her best white evening frock and put up her hair, and became in the
firelight more of a lady, a very young lady but still a lady, than she
had ever been to him before. She was dark like her mother, but not of
the same willowy type; she had more of her father's sturdy build, and
she had developed her shoulders at hockey and tennis.
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