No, she is not. Crosby is a big man, if anything, and she is the tiniest creature. Her features are tiny too, but exquisitely moulded. The coquettish mouth, the nose ‘tip-tilted like a flower,’ the well-poised dainty head, the hands, the feet—all are small, and her figure slender as a fairy’s. She is wonderfully pretty in a brilliant fashion, and her bright eyes are alight with intelligence. She is altogether the last person in the world Susan would have imagined as Crosby’s sister. And yet there is certainly a likeness between them—a strange likeness—but, of course, his sister should have been large and massive, not a little thing like this. Susan has always told herself that she should be dreadfully afraid of his sister—but to be afraid of this sister!
Lady Forster, indeed, is one of those women who look as if they ought to be called ‘Baby’ or ‘Birdie,’ but in reality she was named Katherine at her birth, with a big and a stern K, not a C—which we all know is much milder—and never did Susan hear her called anything less majestic by anyone. Not even by her brother or her husband. And this was probably because, beneath her charming butterfly air, there lay a good deal of character and a strength of will hardly to be suspected in so slight a creature.
‘No,’ says Susan shyly. She smiles, and involuntarily tightens her fingers on those she is holding—Lady Forster’s fingers. ‘But—’ A still greater shyness overcomes her here, and she grows quite silent. The ‘but,’ however, is eloquent.
‘You see, George! She thinks I am infinitely superior to you. How lovely of her!’ She laughs at Susan and pats her hand. ‘You will come up and lunch with us to-morrow, won’t you? It is George’s birthday. And considering the slap you have given him just now, you can hardly refuse. It will be a little sop to his pride, and that’s frightful! He thinks himself a perfect joy! I’m told that in Darkest Africa the belles—’
Here Crosby gives her a surreptitious but vigorous nudge, and she breaks off her highly-spiced and distinctly interesting, if slightly unveracious, account of his doings in Uganda.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ asks she, whispering, of her brother, who whispers back to her many admonitory things. She turns again to Susan: ‘We shall expect you to-morrow, then. It will be a charity to enliven us, as we hardly know what to do with ourselves, being strangers in a strange land.’
‘Thank you,’ says Susan faintly. How on earth can she ever summon up courage enough to go and lunch up there with all these fashionable people? It is she who will be the stranger in a strange land.
‘That is settled then,’ says Crosby quickly. Had he feared she would go on to say something more—to say that she had an engagement? ‘I will call for you at twelve.’
‘Oh no,’ says Susan. ‘I’—confusedly—‘I can walk up. It—it is too much trouble.’
‘George doesn’t think so,’ says Lady Forster, with a faint grimace. ‘Is this your brother?’