Mrs. Fisher had a deep voice, very like a man’s, for she had been overtaken by that strange masculinity that sometimes pursues a woman during the last laps of her life.
Scrap tried to pretend that she was asleep, but if she had been her cigarette would not have been held in her fingers but would have been lying on the ground.
She forgot this. Mrs. Fisher did not, and coming inside the loop, sat down on a narrow stone seat built out of the wall. For a little she could sit on it; for a little, till the chill began to penetrate.
She contemplated the figure before her. Undoubtedly a pretty creature, and one that would have had a success at Farringford. Strange how easily even the greatest men were moved by exteriors. She had seen with her own eyes Tennyson turn away from everybody—turn, positively, his back on a crowd of eminent people assembled to do him honour, and withdraw to the window with a young person nobody had ever heard of, who had been brought there by accident and whose one and only merit—if it be a merit, that which is conferred by chance—was beauty. Beauty! All over before you can turn round. An affair, one might almost say, of minutes. Well, while it lasted it did seem able to do what it liked with men. Even husbands were not immune. There had been passages in the life of Mr. Fisher . . .
“I expect the journey has upset you,” she said in her deep voice. “What you want is a good dose of some simple medicine. I shall ask Domenico if there is such a thing in the village as castor oil.”
Scrap opened her eyes and looked straight at Mrs. Fisher.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Fisher, “I knew you were not asleep. If you had been you would have let your cigarette fall to the ground.”
Scrap threw the cigarette over the parapet.
“Waste,” said Mrs. Fisher. “I don’t like smoking for women, but I still less like waste.”
“What does one do with people like this?” Scrap asked herself, her eyes fixed on Mrs. Fisher in what felt to her an indignant stare but appeared to Mrs. Fisher as really charming docility.