Then we had tea and Betty’s good impression increased. She went away whispering to me on the stairs that she was quite ready to tide Miss Harris over her difficulties and help her when she had decided what she wanted to do.
XIII
The weather is fine and we are all recuperating. I must confess the physical and spiritual storm of the last six weeks has rather laid me waste. I haven’t felt so much in so many ways since—well, my high water mark was the last year of my married life and that’s getting to be a faded canvas. The metaphor is somewhat mixed, but if I draw attention to it it can pass. I’m like that letter-writing English woman who couldn’t spell, and when she was doubtful about a word always underlined it and if it was wrong it passed for a joke.
We sit about a good deal in my front room and late in the afternoon Lizzie’s admirers drop in. The doctor, by the way, is one of them. He says he’s still interested in “the case,” poor young man. Lizzie greets them with wistful softness and seems as indifferent to their homage as if they were pictures hanging on the wall. I talk to them, and while we talk we are acutely conscious of her, singularly dominated by her compelling presence.
In all the change in her that quality is as strong as ever. I do not yet know what it is that makes her the focusing point of everybody’s attention, but that she is, nobody who has lived in this house could deny. I believe actresses are trained to “take the stage and hold it,” but Lizzie has the faculty as a birthright. It is not her looks; I have seen hundreds of women who were as handsome as she and had no such ascendency. It is not the high-handed way she imposes her personality upon every one, because she doesn’t do that any more. It is not her serene self-absorption, her unconscious ignoring of your little claims to be a person of importance. It’s something so powerful no one can escape it, and so subtle no one can define it—some sort of magnetic force that puts her always in the center, makes her presence felt like an unescapable sound or a penetrating light. Wherever she is she is “it.” “Where the MacGregor sits there is the head of the table.”
Wednesday afternoon in the slack hours—the rush hours are from five to seven, when the men come home from business—Mrs. Stregazzi, the eldest small Stregazzi and Mr. Berwick dropped in. They had just heard of her illness and came to make inquiries. Berwick explained this because Mrs. Stregazzi couldn’t. In a large, black lynx turban that looked like Robinson Crusoe’s hat, and a long plush coat, she dropped on the end of the sofa tapping her chest in explanatory pantomime and fetching loud breaths from the bottom of her lungs.
Berwick looked morosely at her, then explained:
“It’s cigarettes—cuts her wind.”
“It’s my new corset,” Mrs. Stregazzi shot out between gasps, “and your stairs.”
The small Stregazzi, a little pale girl of ten, eyed her mother for a considering moment, then apparently satisfied with her symptoms, sat down on the prie-dieu and heaving a deep sigh, folded her hands in her lap and assumed a patient expression.