Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/26

 This consisted of a bedraggled but miraculously serviceable suit of tweed with a skirt which trailed the ground alike in dust and mud, and a large flowered picture hat on which the roses, from the constant assault of the brilliant Italian sunlight, had long since lost the glory of their original aniline mauves and magentas. Over this hat she wore a thick black veil and always on her hands she wore white cotton gloves.

So little was known of her that in death there seemed no one who was certain even of her nationality. One of the two Brinoë newspapers (bitter rivals of each other) described her as "Miss Annie Spragg, born at Newcastle-on-Tino (sic), England,"—a quite natural mistake due to the conviction of all Italians that anyone eccentric must be English. It was the mysterious Mrs. Weatherby who stepped forward and corrected that impression. In bad Italian she tactlessly addressed a letter to the rival paper pointing out with some nationalistic feeling that Miss Annie Spragg was certainly not English, but American, and that she had once been a resident of Winnebago Falls, Iowa, a city of which Mrs. Weatherby was herself a native. Mrs. Weatherby wrote that she had recognized the old maid soon after coming to Brinoë when she encountered her one day in the Piazza San Giovanni. The letter was signed Henrietta Weatherby (Mrs. Alonzo Weatherby), Villa Leonardo, Monte Salvatore.

Mrs. Weatherby was herself, Mr. Winnery believed, something of an eccentric. In winter and in the spring she was to be seen driving about the town in a fiacre, clad all in white, with a flowing white veil.