“But that’s too literary! Oh, of course! Old women in alms-houses....”
She was talking, it was so easy to see, against her eyes. Now she was here she didn’t want to see Gerald. She was trying to put off the moment when her eyes must rest on Gerald. Still just within the dingy room, she looked everywhere but at Gerald.
“Lot of books,” she said.
I made to go, but the slightest hint of a start detained me. She suggested her gestures. That was a very quiet lady. She didn’t, if you please, intrude her womanhood on the occasion. Women do that unconsciously. But she didn’t do it, unconsciously. She met a man on his own ground. That was a gallant lady.
“Might just as well come away,” I muttered. I was used to Gerald, but at the moment, at her sudden whisper, I would have liked to murder him. Here for sixteen months not a soul had come to see him—and now, before his sister, and his twin sister too, he was in this vile state. But she had insisted on seeing him. What could I do? I promised Gerald a pretty speech on the morrow. He would be more or less human to-morrow, for Gerald had those phenomenal recuperative powers that are peculiar to lean drunkards.
“The illness,” I told her, “goes in periods of three days. On the first day he is thoughtful, on the second he is thoughtless, and on the third speechless.”
I could not see her face, her back was to me. The leather jacket, the brave green hat, the thoughtful poise. But I heard her whisper the name of the inert thing sprawling half on a broken Windsor chair and half across the littered table, and it was as though there was a smile in the whisper, and I thought to myself that these twins must have been great playmates once upon a time. “Gerald!” she whispered. “Gerald! Gerald!”
“Oh, go to hell!” muttered Gerald, and, without looking up, without waking up, twitched his head feverishly to one side, upsetting a tea-cup half-full of whisky.
“He thinks it’s me,” I explained from the door, and suddenly I found her looking at me over her shoulder, so thoughtfully. I can see her now, the way she suddenly looked at me, half over her leather shoulder, thinking I knew not what, and her right hand spread out on her brother’s arm. There was a striking emerald on the third finger of her right hand, livid against the dark thing that was Gerald March.