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There was no small curiosity about the mysterious rite amongst the boys who were her especial friends, and it had become rather a point of honour to be "done" together. Consequently Hilaria looked very demure as she went through her steps with the mechanical ease of long practice and the supple grace that was her own and yet had the adorable awkwardness of her age in it.
None of this did he realise, neither did Hilaria, so they were spared much unhappiness, merely fretting blindly without knowing why. Hilaria was not a beauty, though she would be considered more nearly so now than then, when a high forehead and well-sleeked hair were almost necessities of life.
And Ishmael felt the warm dazzle of the light and thought of the moor and how in another half-hour or so the shadows would be long beside the pool and the trout beginning to rise at their supper, and of how he would like to be a holy hermit and live alone there with a dog and a gun and a rod and God; while Killigrew was divided between trying to signal a question to Hilaria and wishing he could paint the dim room with its splashes of sun and wondering what colours he could get that would be pure enough; and Hilaria was wishing Ishmael would give her a chance to whisper to him the news she was burning to impart and not merely stare at her and everything else with that blank gaze that always seemed to go through her to the wall beyond.
"Hilaria!" he said, half sharply, half plaintively. She swung round at him with that beautiful sway only a crinoline can give, checking the movement abruptly so that the full sphere of muslin went surging back for another half-turn while her body stayed rigid. "Yes, Papa, I am ready. Can't you find all your right books?"
Ishmael had scrambled up; his blood was still singing in his veins; he felt no dismay at the sight of the looming Doughty. "Don't be an ass, Doughty," said Polkinghorne sharply; "and if you can't help being a cad, wait till Miss Eliot isn't present." "Oh, never mind about me; I want to see you kill him, Ishmael!" cried Hilaria viciously.
Till that moment he and she had equally despised anything ladylike.... Now he had become a man, with a man's dislike of anything conspicuous in his womenkind. Something of the woman came to Hilaria, but whereas with him adolescence had meant the awakening of the merely male, with her it brought a first touch of the mother. She urged her own cause no more. "Don't worry, Ishmael," she said.
"She reminded me of someone, and at first I couldn't think who," said Ishmael, feeling a queer little pleasure at talking of her thus casually; "and then I remembered Hilaria you remember little Hilaria Eliot, who used to be so jolly to us all at St. Renny?" "She is the last person I should have compared with Miss Grey," said Killigrew decidedly.
He came to a pause at last, aware that he had missed the way to the hotel where he was to sup with Carminow and Killigrew. He looked at the name of the street he was in, and saw that it was the name Carminow had mentioned as being that of the street where Hilaria was lodged. He stood between the rows of houses and tried to realise that one of them sheltered Hilaria.
There was Hilaria, joyous also ... he had forgotten her for years now. At St. Renny life was always just ahead, and he only had the sense of preparing for it, of being ready to leap into it as into some golden cool stream of running waters.... In those days it had been Cloom, the place made for him in life, that had held so much of glamour in its grey walls and hard acres.
But how about Hilaria?" asked her admirer. "Well, she's more sensible than most, because she wants to do things as though she weren't a girl, but I don't see how she's going to keep it up. She'll fall in love and then it'll all be over." "You don't think much of girls, do you?" "Oh, well ... they're all right, I suppose. I want to do things, and girls want to feel things.
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