'Been there?' repeated Wemyss, drawing her away for he wanted his
coffee. 'How can I remember? Ever since I've lived here, I should think.
He died five years ago. He was a wonderful old man, nearly ninety. He
used to stay here a lot.'
Opposite this picture hung another, next to the door that led into the
hall,--also a photograph enlarged to life-size. Lucy had noticed neither
of these pictures when she came in, because the light from the windows
was in her eyes. Now, turning to go out through the door led by Wemyss,
she was faced by this one.
It was Vera. She knew at once; and if she hadn't she would have known
the next minute, because he told her.
'Vera,' he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, as it were introducing them.
'Vera,' repeated Lucy under her breath; and she and Vera--for this
photograph too followed one about with its eye--stared at each other.
It must have been taken about twelve years earlier, judging from the
clothes. She was standing, and in a day dress that yet had a train to it
trailing on the carpet, and loose, floppy sleeves and a high collar. She
looked very tall, and had long thin fingers. Her dark hair was drawn up
from her ears and piled on the top of her head. Her face was thin and
seemed to be chiefly eyes,--very big dark eyes that stared out of the
absurd picture in a kind of astonishment, and her mouth had a little
twist in it as though she were trying not to laugh.
Lucy looked at her without moving. So this was Vera. Of course. She had
known, though she had never constructed any image of her in her mind,
had carefully avoided doing it, that she would be like that. Only older;
the sort of Vera she must have been at forty when she died,--not
attractive like that, not a young woman. To Lucy at twenty-two, forty
seemed very old; at least, if you were a woman. In regard to men, since
she had fallen in love with some one of forty-five who was certainly the
youngest thing she had ever come across, she had rearranged her ideas of
age, but she still thought forty very old for a woman. Vera had been
thin and tall and dark in her idea of her, just as this Vera was thin
and tall and dark; but thin bonily, tall stoopingly, and her dark hair
was turning grey. In her idea of her, too, she was absent-minded and not
very intelligent; indeed, she was rather troublesomely unintelligent,
doing obstinate, foolish things, and at last doing that fatal,
obstinate, foolish thing which so dreadfully ended her. This Vera was
certainly intelligent. You couldn't have eyes like that and be a fool.
And the expression of her mouth,--what had she been trying not to laugh
at that day? Did she know she was going to be enlarged and hang for
years in the bleak dining-room facing her father-in-law, each of them
eyeing the other from their walls, while three times a day the originals
sat down beneath their own pictures at the long table and ate? Perhaps
she laughed, thought Lucy, because else she might have cried; only that
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