Caroline ate, silently and earnestly. She had eaten her last three meals, remember, out of a shoe box.
Very early, with the soup, Aunt Eunice asked her if she would like a glass of milk.
“Yes, please, thank you,” said Caroline, “if it isn’t too much trouble.”
After that, conversation so far as concerned Caroline, ceased to exist. She ate, and was glad that no one noticed her, or so she thought. But someone must have noticed her, it seemed. For when Caroline was half through her little tart, eating in careful small bites, as her mother had taught her, and holding her fork nicely, Cousin Penelope spoke out of a clear sky.
“She really favors our side of the family, doesn’t she, Mother?”
“Jacqueline?”
“Yes. The resemblance is striking. Just look at Great-aunt Joanna Gildersleeve.”
For the life of her Caroline couldn’t help looking round, in the direction in which Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope both were looking. She half expected to see another great-aunt standing right at her elbow. But instead she only saw, hanging upon the wall above the sideboard, the portrait of a rather forbidding lady in a cap, with a curtain parting on a landscape just behind her.
“I don’t quite see the likeness,” murmured Aunt Eunice.
“It’s something in the inner curve of the eyebrow and the set of the nostrils,” Cousin Penelope explained patiently. “It’s almost indefinable but quite unmistakable.”