I grew more impatient. I wanted to get out of this stage into something more personal. I thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep me from getting at her errand at Callan's. But I didn't want to know her errand; I wanted to make love to her. As for Fox and Gurnard and Churchill, the Foreign Minister, who really was a sympathetic character and did stand for political probity, she might be uttering allegorical truths, but I was not interested in them. I wanted to start some topic that would lead away from this Dimensionist farce.
"My dear sister," I began.... Callan always moved about like a confounded eavesdropper, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the corners of screens. I expect he got copy like that.
"So, she's your sister?" he said suddenly, from behind me. "Strange that you shouldn't recognise the handwriting...."
"Oh, we don't correspond," I said light-heartedly, "we are _so_ different." I wanted to take a rise out of the creeping animal that he was. He confronted her blandly.
"You must be the little girl that I remember," he said. He had known my parents ages ago. That, indeed, was how I came to know him; I wouldn't have chosen him for a friend. "I thought Granger said you were dead ... but one gets confused...."
"Oh, we see very little of each other," she answered. "Arthur might have said I was dead--he's capable of anything, you know." She spoke with an assumption of sisterly indifference that was absolutely striking. I began to think she must be an actress of genius, she did it so well. She _was_ the sister who had remained within the pale; I, the rapscallion of a brother whose vagaries were trying to his relations. That was the note she struck, and she maintained it. I didn't know what the deuce she was driving at, and I didn't care. These scenes with a touch of madness appealed to me. I was going to live, and here, apparently, was a woman ready to my hand. Besides, she was making a fool of Callan, and that pleased me. His patronising manners had irritated me.
I assisted rather silently. They began to talk of mutual acquaintances--as one talks. They both seemed to know everyone in this world. She gave herself the airs of being quite in the inner ring; alleged familiarity with quite impossible persons, with my portentous aunt, with Cabinet Ministers--that sort of people. They talked about them--she, as if she lived among them; he, as if he tried very hard to live up to them.