It was all I caught; but it was enough to put even Mildred Averill on a secondary plane.
"If you've found your soul—" she was saying.
"Oh, I'm not sure of that. I only feel that I've found—something. I mean that something has come, or gone, I'm not sure of which; only that—"
Mrs. Mountney wheeled suddenly from the piano, trotting back to the edge of the carpet, across which she spoke to me.
"Did you ever hear of Copley's great portrait of Jasper Soames?"
I nodded, speechlessly. I had heard of it. In my mind's eye I saw it, at the head of a great staircase, a full-length figure, wearing knee-breeches of bottle-green satin, a gold-embroidered waistcoat, and a long coat of ruby velvet with a Russian sable collar falling back almost to the shoulders. A plate let into the foot of the frame bore the name Jasper Soames, with the dates of a birth and a death. Somewhere in my life the picture had been a familiar object.
I had no time to follow up this discovery before Mrs. Mountney began again:
"Are you one of his descendants?"
"No; but my wife is."
The reply came out before I realized its significance. I hardly knew what I had said till I heard Lulu Averill exclaim with as much indignation as her indolent tones could carry: