Her name was not among those originally chosen by the Portrait Committee and submitted to me. It was Madge who, by half-past twelve the following day, had decided to include her. We were walking along together to Gloucester Road Station. Madge was going out to lunch.
"Well, go and see her," she said.... "But they ought to have let you sleep on, George. I wish I hadn't left you that book."
"Oh, I'm perfectly fit and fresh. The Boltons, you said? I shall go and see her this afternoon."
We entered the station. I took my friend's ticket. I saw her to the gate of her lift, and the attendant paused, his hand on the iron lattice.
"Well," she said, "I think you'll find that won't matter. Let me know how you go on. Good-bye--and you can tell the Bear from me that no decent person believes a word of it."
And with a wave of her hand across the grille she sank with the lift into the ground.
I walked to my Club, lunched alone, and then, in a corner of the smoking-room, busied myself with my rather scanty recollections of the lady I was going to see that afternoon. Though I had only actually met her upon one occasion, we had a sort of hearsay acquaintance in addition. She and Derwent Rose had been children together, and one does not begin quite at the beginning with the friends of one's friends. Moreover, there are these people whom one may actually meet only at wide intervals, but over whom absence does not seem to have its ordinary power. Nothing seems to ice over, you come together again at the point where you left off. Perhaps because you draw your nourishment from the same elements, you are able to take the gaps for granted.
Nevertheless, of my own single personal meeting with Miss Oliphant I could remember little but her eyes. I had been presented to her across a small dinner-table, with rosy-shaded electric candles, that had turned those great eyes pansy-black in the pinky gloom. I had guessed that in the daylight they were of the deep brown kind that, alas, so frequently means glasses for reading and distressing headaches; but what had struck me at the time had been their quiet readiness and familiarity, as if they said to me, "He's told me about you; I wonder what he's said to you about me!"