This summer she had come to England. She was no longer afraid of damp and cold. And Bartie followed her.
Dorothy and Michael had no difficulty in remembering Vera, though it was more than six years since they had seen her; for Vera looked the same. Her hair still shone like copper-beech leaves; her face had still the same colour and the same sweet, powdery smell. And if these things had changed Frances would still have known her by her forehead that looked so broad because her eyebrows and her eyes were so long, and by her fine, unfinished, passionate mouth, by her pointed chin and by her ways.
But though her brother-in-law's ways had always been more or less disagreeable, Frances was not prepared for the shock of the renewed encounter with Bartholomew. Bartie was long and grey, and lean even when you allowed for the thickness of his cholera belt. He wore a white scarf about his throat, for his idea was that he had cancer in it. Cancer made you look grey. He, too, had the face of a hawk, of a tired and irritable hawk. It drooped between his hunched shoulders, his chin hanging above the scarf as if he were too tired or too irritable to hold it up. He behaved to Vera and Veronica as if it was they who had worried him into cancer of the throat, they who tired and irritated him.
Vera talked to him as you might talk to a sick child whose peevishness prolongs, unreasonably, its pain. Bartie's manner almost amounted to a public repudiation of her. The whole house vibrated to the shutting of his door at Good-night time. Yet when Bartie came down in the morning, late, and more morose than ever, Vera's mouth made as if it kissed some visionary image of the poor thing's absurdity. She didn't believe for one minute in his cancer. It was an excuse for the shutting of his door.
She kept out of his way as much as possible; yet, when they were together they watched each other. They watched; Bartie openly with sudden dartings and swoopings of his hawk's eyes; Vera furtively. Her eyes were so large and long that, without turning her head, or any visible movement, they could hold his image.
But for Captain Cameron Vera's eyes had a full, open gaze. Spread wide apart under her wide forehead they were like dark moth's wings; they hovered, rested, flickering, vibrating to the fine tips of their corners.
Whatever had been the matter with him in India, Captain Cameron had recovered. His keen, fair, Highland face made Bartie's face look terrible. Ferdie was charming; not more charming to Bartie's wife than he was to Frances; not more charming to Frances than to her sisters; so that even Louie unbent, and Emmeline and Edith fell in love with him. He flirted with Frances under Anthony's nose; and with the Aunties under Grannie's nose. The corners of Vera's mouth followed the tilt of her long eyes' corners as she saw him do it.
You could not think of Vera as the children's Auntie, or as Bartie's wife, or as Veronica's mother.
Veronica was a very little girl who sang songs and was afraid of ghosts.
She slept in her mother's room, and so never could be put to bed till half-past seven, or till her mother was dressed to the last hook of her gown, the last hairpin, the last touch of powder (adhesive without bismuth), and the last shadow drawn fine about her eyelashes. When Vera beautiful in a beautiful gown, came trailing into the room where everybody waited for her, Veronica hid herself behind Uncle Anthony's big chair. When her father told her to come out of that and say good-night and be quick about it, she came slowly (she was not in the least afraid of Bartie), showing herself bit by bit, honey-coloured hair, eyebrows dark under her gold, very dark against her white; sorrowful, transparent, lucid eyes. A little girl with a straight white face. A little, slender girl in a straight white frock. She stood by Anthony's chair, spinning out the time, smiling at him with her childish wavering mouth, a smile that would not spread, that never went higher than the tip of her white nose, that left her lucid, transparent eyes still sorrowful.