“Hello,” said Vincent, in the light and cheerful voice, that contrasted so surprisingly with the dejected droop of his moustaches, “there goes the richest spinster in England.” He nodded towards their retreating backs.
“Oh?” said Bertram, raising interested eyebrows.
“Yes—the thin girl in grey, with the white sunshade,” Vincent apprised him. “Been bestowing largesse on the pigeons, let us hope. The Rubensy-looking woman with her is Lady Dor—a sister of Harry Pontycroft's. I think you know Pontycroft, don't you?”
Bertram showed animation. “I know him very well indeed—we've been friends for years—I'm extremely fond of him. That's his sister? I've never met his people. Dor, did you say her name was?”
“Wife of Sir Frederick Dor, of Dortown, an Irishman, a Roman Catholic, and a Unionist M.P.,” answered Vincent, and it seemed uncanny in a way to hear the muse of small-talk speaking from so tenebrous a mien. “The thin girl is a Miss Ruth Adgate—American, I believe, but domiciled in England. You must have seen her name in the newspapers—they've had a lot about her, apropos of one thing or another; and the other day she distinguished herself at the sale of the Rawleigh collection, by paying three thousand pounds for one of the Karasai ivories—record price, I fancy. She's said to have a bagatelle of something like fifty thousand a year in her own right.”
“Really?” murmured Bertram.
But he could account now for his puzzled feeling last night, that he had seen Lucilla before. With obvious unlikenesses—for where she was plump and smooth, pink and white, Harry Pontycroft was brown and lined and bony—there still existed between her and her brother a resemblance so intimate, so essential, that our friend could only marvel at his failure to think of it at once. 'Twas a resemblance one couldn't easily have localised, but it was intimate and essential and unmistakable.
“So that is Ponty's sister. I see. I understand,” he mused aloud.
“Yes,” said Lewis Vincent, stretching his long legs under the table, while a soul in despair seemed to gaze from his haggard face. “She looks like a fair, fat, feminine incarnation of Ponty himself, doesn't she? Funny thing, family likeness; hard to tell what it resides in. Not in the features, certainly; not in the flesh at all, I expect. In the spirit—it's metaphysical. One might know Lady Dor anywhere for Pontycroft's sister; yet externally she's as unlike him as a pat of butter is unlike a walnut. But it's the spirit showing through, the kindred spirit, the sister spirit? What? You don't think so?”
“Oh, yes, I think you're quite right,” answered Bertram, a trifle perfunctorily perhaps. “By the by, I wish you'd introduce me to her.”