The drawing-room extended for almost half the length of the big house. It was the largest room that Kate had ever seen or imagined outside of a castle. Just at first she could not discover her aunt in it. But soon her glance found her sitting down at the farthest end near one of the French doors that stood wide open into the garden. Her head was turned away, but the shape and pose of that head and the way she sat in her chair, with a book but not reading, reminded Kate sharply and poignantly of her mother. Why hadn’t Katherine warned her that they were so much alike?
She went toward her softly because of her shyness, her feet hardly making a sound on the Persian rugs, past the tables and divans and lamps. It was seven o’clock of a July evening now, and the shadows lent a lovely charm to the big room that was peculiarly charming even in broadest daylight. Kate felt as she went toward her aunt that she was walking in a dream. And it was a very nice dream, too, for that glimpse of the likeness of her aunt to her mother had reassured her completely. All her previous ideas of her aunt were swept away, and the anticipations of this visit, which for a little had been dampened, now returned with fresh life.
Miss Frazier turned as Kate came near. Hastily she put her book, still open as Kate’s mother would have, on a table at her hand and rose. She kissed Kate with warmth and dignity and then held her off, the tips of her fingers on her shoulders.
“You’re not one bit like your mother,” she affirmed. “Not one least bit.”
“Don’t accuse me,” Kate said, laughing. “I would have been if I could, of course. But wouldn’t it have been rather confusing to have had three of us so much alike? The names are confusing enough.”
If someone could have told Kate an hour—no, two minutes—ago that on first meeting her aunt she would speak so easily, so without self-consciousness, she would not have believed. She had expected to be constrained, awkward. But then she had never expected Aunt Katherine to be so agreeable as she apparently was.
Aunt Katherine was smiling quite brilliantly. Kate had instantly touched and pleased her. “Does it really seem to you that I am anything like your mother?”
Kate nodded. But even as she nodded, she saw the difference suddenly. Aunt Katherine was taller, of course; but that was not it. Her firm, squarish chin was not neutralized by melting gray eyes as Katherine’s was. Aunt Katherine’s eyes were dark and their expression echoed the strong chin; it was a sure expression, penetrating and above all intellectual. And the lines about the mouth and eyes were lines that Katherine would never have at any age. They were lines of loneliness and trouble.
Even as Kate was thinking all this—lightning-quick thinking it was, of course—she saw the lines deepen and the mouth and eyes harden perceptibly. “It is past dinner time. Didn’t Elsie come down with you?” The hardening was not for Kate’s tardiness; it was for Elsie’s.
“I haven’t seen her. I don’t believe she was in her room or she would have heard me.”