We
had tea upon the terrace under the cedar, but old Lady Osprey, being an
embittered Protestant, had never before seen the inside of the house,
and we made a sort of tour of inspection that reminded me of my first
visit to the place. In spite of my preoccupation with Beatrice, I stored
a queer little memory of the contrast between the two other women; my
aunt, tall, slender and awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping dress, an
omnivorous reader and a very authentic wit, and the lady of pedigree,
short and plump, dressed with Victorian fussiness, living at the
intellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction, pink in the face
and generally flustered by a sense of my aunt's social strangeness and
disposed under the circumstances to behave rather like an imitation
of the more queenly moments of her own cook. The one seemed made of
whalebone, the other of dough. My aunt was nervous, partly through the
intrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly because of her
passionate desire to watch Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took a
common form with her, a wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbation
of her habitual oddity of phrase which did much to deepen the pink
perplexity of the lady of title.
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