Her Faithful Knight — page 253: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Aylmer to the Rescue. 249 dozen portraits of “Miss Phyllis Knight,” which he had bought in the belief that they were meant to represent Dorothy, and had found singularly neste and un- satisfactory. Not only were Dorothy’s features more septs fearal tiful than those of her unhappy sister, but in the soft, ap- pealing prettiness of the latter there had been no trace of the force of character, the swift intelligence, or the pas- sionate impulsiveness, which a close observer might have read in the face of the elder sister. : Very often in his leisure moments Aylmer Read had spread the twenty-four photographs out before him and had endeavored, for the most part vainly, to reconcile them with his memory of the sunny-haired girl, with the firmly- closed lips and changing gray eyes, whom he had chosen to set up in his heart as his ideal of womanhood. Remembering her little scornful speeches, her avowed determination to dispense with the sentimental admiration of men, and that proud reserve of manner which was but a cloak for her natural girlish high spirits and a certain de- mure, dainty coquetry which characterized her, Aylmer had tried by the hour to trace in her many different photo- graphs something of the personality which had so strongly attracted him. He found, however, in them nothing but a pretty woman, prettier in some than in others, a tender, clinging, gentle, creature, but never his “Diana the Dis- dainful”’ of the sculpture galleries, who had rippled into laughter over his bad drawing, had thawed into friend- ship on their last walk home from the Grassmarket Theatre, and who had from that moment disappeared so mysteriously from his ken. He had even bought and studied theatrical papers, and had found and tracked the progress of more than one actress named Knight, and, among others, of a Dorothy of that ilk, who for a period of six weeks had played with GComicsoo S (E©) 5