Ginevra was still a silent, simple, unconsciously retiring, and therewith dignified girl, in whom childhood and womanhood had begun to interchange hues, as it were with the play of colours in a dove's neck.

Happy they in whom neither has a final victory! Happy also all who have such women to love! At one moment Ginevra would draw herself up--bridle her grandmother would have called it--with involuntary recoil from doubtful approach; the next, Ginny would burst out in a merry laugh at something in which only a child could have perceived the mirth-causing element; then again the woman would seem suddenly to re-enter and rebuke the child, for the sparkle would fade from her eyes, and she would look solemn, and even a little sad.

The people about the place loved her, but from the stillness on the general surface of her behaviour, the far away feeling she gave them, and the impossibility of divining how she was thinking except she chose to unbosom herself, they were all a little afraid of her as well.

They did not acknowledge, even to themselves, that her evident conscientiousness bore no small part in causing that slight uneasiness of which they were aware in her presence.

Possibly it roused in some of them such a dissatisfaction with themselves as gave the initiative to dislike of her.
In the mind of her new maid, however, there was no strife, therefore no tendency to dislike.