Chapter Forty-Eight
Her head was turned away from me, a striped parasol leaned over her shoulder. With a faintly defiant tilt of her beautiful head, as if exclaiming, "See, Strangeness, I come!" she stepped firmly on over the turf. A breath of some delicate indoor perfume was wafted across to my nostrils. I clung to my stone, watching her.
Simply because it seemed a meanness to play the spy on her in her solitude, I called her name. But her start of surprise was mere feigning. The silk of her parasol encircled her shoulders like an immense nimbus. Her eyes dwelt on me, as if gathering up the strands of an unpleasing memory.
"Ah, Midgetina," she called softly, "it is you, is it, on your little stone? Are you better?" The very voice seemed conscious of its own cadences. "What a delicious old garden. The contrast!"
The contrast. With a cold gathering apprehension at my heart I glanced around me. Why was it that of all people only Fanny could so shrink me up like this into my body? And there floated back to remembrance the vast, dazzling room, the flower-clotted table, and, in that hideous vertigo, a face frenzied with disgust and rage, a hand flung out to cast me off. But I entered her trap none the less.
"Contrast, Fanny?"
"No, no, now, my dear! Not quite so disingenuous as all that, please. You can't have quite forgotten the last time we met."
"There was nothing in that, Fanny. Only that the midge was drunk. You should see the wasps over there in the nectarines."
"Only?" she echoed lightly, raising her eyebrows. "I am not sure that every one would put it quite like that. You couldn't see yourself, you see. They call you little Miss Cassandra now. Woe! Woe! you know. Mrs Monnerie asked me if I thought you were—you know—'all there,' as they say."