Perhaps an inch or two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a _completed_ slenderness, I might say--a slenderness so palpably finished as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme.
It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming, that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would admit.
Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but patently disparage me at this moment.

I was by no means an unfinished young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that behind; the moment was one wherein relaxation would have been not only graceful but entirely safe, for she was in no manner to be held accountable for my conduct.
Yet again and again her curious reserve congealed me back upon the stanch regard of Miss Caroline.

My passion for that sprightly dame and her gracious acceptance of it were happily not to deteriorate under the regard of any possible daughter, however egregiously might we flaunt to her trained eye our need to be "finished." The newcomer's reserve was indeed pregnable to no assault I could devise.

Not even did she lighten when I said to her mother, in open mockery of that reserve, "Well, she cost you a lot of furniture that was really most companionable about the house," and paused with a sigh betokening a regretful comparison of values.

That lance shattered against her Lansdale shield like all the others.
Ending my call, I felt vividly what I have elsewhere seen described as "the cosmic chill".