Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/84

 have what he could only phrase as the connection; and she would not less assuredly be hard: she wouldn't without that have what he could only think of as the nerve. He dressed her, with unwitting confusion, in the old manner of the house—the manner of the two or three portraits of women (these, alas, plainly enough, not from illustrious or even from known hands) inserted in the woodwork of the reception rooms, he heard for an instant, hallucinated, the scrape of her stiff petticoat on the floor, and the tap of her shoes, if it weren't rather the click of her small crutch, on the stone stair. She wore a little black hood fastened under her chin by an ornament—that old-time trinket would be priceless of a truth; and her pronunciation of certain words made her, as she talked, difficult to understand. Could she, he wistfully wondered, live in the house as it stood?—it being, as might have been made out, a puzzle to him to see her there so poorly convenienced, and yet not less a pain to equip her with a background of cosy corners or photographs framed in leather, of tailor-made ladies doing tricks with little dogs and gentlemen in tweed mixtures tilting back "good" chairs.

The few portraits of men in the house were not sensibly superior to the three or four women's, besides being, in a couple of cases, of a date observably later; but they had alike that prime and sufficient property of the old portrait they had, 70