"You must be Gladys," I said, wondering if I looked as sheepish as I felt. "How did you recognise me?"
"By your photograph," she said. "You haven't altered a bit."
On the whole I carried it off fairly well, though I was glad Arthur Roden was not present after my implied familiarity with my niece's existence. Of course I knew I had a niece, and that her birthday fell—like the Bastille—on July 14th. Usually I remembered the date and sent her some little trifle, and she would write me a friendly letter of thanks. If I had kept count of the number of birthdays, I should have known she was now nineteen, but then one never does keep count of these things. Frankly, I had imagined her to be about seven or eight, and her handwriting—by becoming steadily more unformed and sporadic the older she grew—did nothing to dispel the illusion. Instead of curious little pieces of jewellery I might easily have sent her a doll....
"Where's the Judge?" I asked as she kissed me and led the way upstairs to her room.
"He's not home yet," she answered to my relief.
"And your mother?"
But my sister-in-law also was out, and I reconciled myself without difficulty to the prospect of taking tea alone with my niece. Possibly as a romantic reaction from her father, possibly with her mother Eve's morbid craving for forbidden fruit, Gladys had elevated me into a Tradition. The whole of her pretty, sun-splashed room seemed hung with absurd curios I had sent her from out-of-the-way parts of the world, while on a table by the window stood a framed photograph of myself in tweeds that only an undergraduate would have worn, and a tie loosely arranged in a vast sailor's knot after the unsightly fashion of the early 'nineties. My hair was unduly long, and at my feet lay a large dog; it must have been a property borrowed for the purpose, as I hate and have always hated dogs.
"A wasted, unsatisfactory life, Gladys," I said as my tour of inspection concluded itself in front of my own portrait. "I wish I'd known about you before. I'd have asked Brian to let me adopt you."
"Would you like to now?"
In the East a complimentary speech is not usually interpreted so literally or promptly.