We knew we should feel strange; we did not know we should feel like this.
I was thankful when they all turned round and called out. "The Tartar" had come, after all.
He made no apology for being late, nor for not having dressed. He strolled in as if the place belonged to him—a great broad-shouldered young man in a frock-coat. He had a round, black, cannon-ball of a head, and his eyebrows nearly joined. His moustache was like a little blacking-brush laid back against the lip, with the bristles sticking straight out. But he seemed to be making this effect deliberately, by pushing out his mouth like a pouting child; or, even more, like a person with swollen lips. I felt sure I could not have seen him before; but there was something oddly familiar about him.
He nodded to the others.
When Aunt Josephine said, "My nieces," he said, "Oh," stared a moment, and then, as he lounged into the empty place, said it had been a rotten race. I thought how astonished my mother would have been at such behaviour. Betty must have been thinking of her, too, for she put on our mother's manner. It was a beautiful manner, but it sat oddly on my little sister; it made her seem more self-possessed than she was. She turned and said: "I think you must be Mr. Whitby-Dawson."
The young man stared.
Everybody stared.
He turned sharply from Betty to his hostess. She shook her head. But the yellow part of her big eyes had turned reddish. She looked very strange.
A creepy feeling came over me.
I remembered she had been "most eccentric" twenty years ago. Was eccentricity the sort of thing that grew worse as people grew older?