It was not very warm; Flora Fleming had the black colouring of the clan; her look was always heavy, almost forbidding. She was in the middle fifties now; there was a heavy threading of gray in her looped, oily dark hair. Her skin was dark and the rough heavy eyebrows almost met above her sharply watchful eyes. There were black hairs at the corners of her lips and against her ears below her temples; her eyes were set a shade too close together, her teeth were slightly yellowed, too prominent, and rested upon her bitten lower lip. She wore, as always, a decent handsome silk that seemed never old and never new; there was a heavy book in her knuckly, nervous hands, and David noted for the first time to-day a discoloured vein or two in her somewhat florid, long face.
“This is good of you, David,” she said, dispassionately, putting her glasses into her book and laying it aside.
“Didn’t wake you from a nap?” David said, glad to sit down after his brisk walk.
“A nap?” She dismissed it with a quiet, not quite pleased smile. “Since when have I had that weakness?” she asked. “No. On an afternoon like this, with the leaves falling, one hears the wind about Wastewater if it blows nowhere else, and the sea. I can never nap in the afternoons. I hear—voices,” she finished, as if half to herself.
“Lord, one realizes how lonely the old place is, coming back to it!” David said, cheerfully.
“Not for me,” his aunt again corrected him in her quiet voice that seemed full of autumnal reveries and the quiet falling of leaves itself. “Other places are lonely. Not this.”
“Well, it’s extremely nice to know that you feel so,” David pursued, resolutely combating the creeping quiet, the something that was almost depression, always ready to come out of musty corners and capture one here. “But when the girls are home we’ll have some young life at Wastewater, and then—when they marry, you’ll have to move yourself into brighter quarters—into a city apartment, perhaps!”
“When they marry?” she repeated, slightly stressing the pronoun.
“As I suppose they will?” David elucidated, looking up.
“They?”