{20}

“Not,” she said, whispered, “for years and years. Nearly ten, I think. Do you think that comes, perhaps, of having been almost twins once upon a time?”

I did not say anything for I was thinking hard. Now I was Gerald’s friend. This lady of the green hat was Gerald’s sister, nay, his twin sister. Fancy, I thought. Where, I asked myself, did one stand? It was a matter for thought, for deep thought, and so I treated it, as she did not appear to be in any great hurry.

Now while these things were passing, the lady and I were standing on my landing, which was four foot by three; she with one foot on the stair below, one leather shoulder against the wall. And one had again, with her, a sense of the conventions.

“You are thinking,” she accused me. “I wonder what about....”

The light that plunged through my half-open sitting-room door fought a great fight with the shadow of her green hat and lit her face mysteriously. She was fair. As they would say it in the England of long ago—she was fair. And she was grave, so grave. That is a sad lady, I thought. To be fair, to be sad ... why, was she intelligent, too? And white she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were{21} blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they sang of better dreams. But no siren, she! That was a sad lady, most grave. And always her hair would be dancing a tawny, formal dance about the small white cheeks.

{21}

She smiled, when it occurred to her that she was looking at me.

“I know what you are thinking,” she said.

“I wonder!”

“Yes. You like Gerald, don’t you?” She thought about that. “Well, what you are thinking is, whether it is fair to him to take me up there in case he is drunk....”

“If only it was ‘in case,’” I said. “You see?”

”

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