“Why?” he asked, with his eyes on her rapt young face. She was, after all, more of a child than he had imagined. But he had not missed the heat-lightning smile of humor that had played momentarily about her lips. And he was grateful for it. It humanized her; it tended to authenticate her reality. He wanted, above everything else, to establish her as real, through and through, very much as he might wish some find in old mahogany not to thin out into mere veneer. “Because my Aunt Georgina is rather anxious to see you,” the girl was saying. “About what?” “About the things you’re interested in.” “But how does she know what I’m interested in?” he demanded, pondering the fact that the enemy had also been active in the fields of reconnaissance. The faded lilac sunbonnet slowly turned until it faced the house front. “I don’t think I can talk to you any longer,” said the girl, with her non-committal eyes once more on his. “But she’ll probably come out when she sees you here.” “But it’s you that I’m interested in,” he protested, impressed by the latent tragedy in the face which a lilac sunbonnet tended to turn into a mockery. It made him think of columbines in a churchyard. Her color deepened painfully, but she did not speak again. She left him there and crossed the sloping, parched lawn and entered the house. Conkling, as he unfolded his camp stool and set up his easel, resented the passing of that slender and lightly swaying figure. The riot of color along the tangled garden paths seemed without meaning. The tones that had first caught his eyes became crude and uncoordinated under a hot afternoon sun. But he remembered what she had said, and he sat there, washing absurd colors together and wondering if she would come back. Then, as the shadows lengthened and time dragged on, he wondered if he was to be ignored even by the monitorial old aunts. But he daubed stubbornly on, and when his patience was all but exhausted he was rewarded by seeing a figure emerge from the house. It was a remarkable figure, and as it bore down on him in silence he studied it with oblique intentness. For it was that of an extremely tall and an extremely angular woman, well past middle life, clad in rusty black silk. On the iron-gray hair, parted and drawn severely down across the pale and narrow forehead, reposed a small black satin cap edged with coffee-colored lace. Half mittens of knitted linen were on the lank hands clasped so fastidiously in front of a narrow waist elongated by its ruchings of rusty silk. On the scrawny throat hung a cameo brooch, oddly repeating the line of the pendulous dewlap under the yellow chin, where the neck, as long and lean as a turkey’s, suggested a poised and persistent wariness. But once this was passed over, there was a general air of limpness, of deadness, about every line of the long body. It was something suggestive of starvation, of starved lives and starved souls, of empty years eked out in empty ways.