‘For the first moment’, the Baron continued, ‘I had no idea who she was. She had spared no pains to make her toilet rusty and grievous by an arrangement of veils and flat-toned dark material with flowers in it, cut plainly and extremely tight over a very small bust, and from the waist down gathered into bulky folds to conceal, no doubt, the widening parts of a woman well over forty. She seemed hurried. She spoke of you.’
The doctor put the menu on his knee. He raised his dark eyes with the bushy brows erect. ‘What did she say?’
The Baron answered, evidently unaware of the tender spot which his words touched: ‘Utter nonsense, to the effect that you are seen nearly every day in a certain nunnery, where you bow and pray and get free meals and attend cases which are, well, illegal.’
The Baron looked up. To his surprise he saw that the doctor had ‘deteriorated’ into that condition in which he had seen him in the street, when he thought himself unobserved.
In a loud voice the doctor said to the waiter, who was within an inch of his mouth: ‘Yes, and with oranges, oranges!’
The Baron continued hastily: ‘She gave me uneasiness because Guido was in the room at the time. She said that she had come to buy a painting—indeed, she offered me a very good price, which I was tempted to take (I’ve been doing a little dealing in old masters lately) for my stay in Vienna—but, as it turned out, she wanted the portrait of my grandmother, which on no account could I bring myself to part with. She had not been in the room five minutes before I sensed that the picture was an excuse, and that what she really wanted was something else. She began talking about the Baronin almost at once, though she mentioned no name at first, and I did not connect the story with my wife until the end. She said, “She is really quite extraordinary. I don’t understand her at all, though I must say I understand her better than other people.” She added this with a sort of false eagerness. She went on: “She always lets her pets die. She is so fond of them, and then she neglects them, the way that animals neglect themselves."
‘I did not like her to talk about this subject, as Guido is very sensitive to animals, and I could fancy what was going on in his mind; he is not like other children, not cruel, or savage. For this very reason he is called “strange". A child who is mature, in the sense that the heart is mature, is always, I have observed, called deficient.’ He gave his order and went on, ‘She then changed the subject—’
‘Tacking into the wind like a barge.’
‘Well, yes, to a story about a little girl she had staying with her (she called her Sylvia); the Baronin was also staying with her at the time, though I did not know that the young woman in question was the Baronin until later—well anyway it appears that this little girl Sylvia had “fallen in love” with the Baronin, and that she, the Baronin, kept waking her up all through the night to ask her if she “loved her".
‘During the holidays, while the child was away, Petherbridge became “anxious"—that is the way she put it—as to whether or not the “young lady had a heart".’