“She was exactly the same as she is now. No, not quite.”
“Nicer?”
“Nicer? What a word! Nice!” He looked all round him and made a flourish with his stick. He could not express himself, yet he seemed unable to be silent. “Do you call the sky nice?”
“Yes, very, when it’s blue.”
He gave, to her great satisfaction, the kind of laugh she had expected. “Let us talk about something a little smaller than the sky,” he said. He looked down at her, and she was relieved to see the anger fading from his face; but she was glad to have learnt something of what he felt for Aunt Rose. To him she was like the sky whence came the rain and the sunshine, where the stars shone and the moon, and she wondered to what he would have compared herself. “You said we might be sisters.”
He looked again. She wore a broad white hat in honour of the season, her black dress was dotted with white; from one capable white hand she swung her gloves; she tilted her chin, a trick she had inherited from her father, in a sort of challenge.
“You like the idea?” he asked.
“I don’t believe it. I’m really the image of my father. Did you know him?”
“No. Heard of him, of course.”
“It’s him I’m like,” Henrietta repeated firmly.