Chapter 2

All this had been for Lady Beldonald an agitation so great that access to
her apartment was denied for a time even to her sister-in-law. It was much
more out of the question of course that she should unveil her face to a
person of my special business with it; so that the question of the portrait
was by common consent left to depend on that of the installation of a
successor to her late companion. Such a successor, I gathered from Mrs.
Munden, widowed childless and lonely, as well as inapt for the minor
offices, she had absolutely to have; a more or less humble alter ago to
deal with the servants, keep the accounts, make the tea and watch the
window-blinds. Nothing seemed more natural than that she should marry
again, and obviously that might come; yet the predecessors of Miss Dadd had
been contemporaneous with a first husband, so that others formed in her
image might be contemporaneous with a second. I was much occupied in those
months at any rate, and these questions and their ramifications losing
themselves for a while to my view, I was only brought back to them by Mrs.
Munden's arrival one day with the news that we were all right again--her
sister-in-law was once more "suited." A certain Mrs. Brash, an American
relative whom she hadn't seen for years, but with whom she had continued to
communicate, was to come out to her immediately; and this person, it
appeared, could be quite trusted to meet the conditions. She was ugly--
ugly enough, without abuse of it, and was unlimitedly good. The position
offered her by Lady Beldonald was moreover exactly what she needed; widowed
also, after many troubles and reverses, with her fortune of the smallest,
and her various children either buried or placed about, she had never had
time or means to visit England, and would really be grateful in her
declining years for the new experience and the pleasant light work involved
in her cousin's hospitality. They had been much together early in life and
Lady Beldonald was immensely fond of her--would in fact have tried to get
hold of her before hadn't Mrs. Brash been always in bondage to family
duties, to the variety of her tribulations. I daresay I laughed at my
friend's use of the term "position"--the position, one might call it, of a
candlestick or a sign-post, and I daresay I must have asked if the special
service the poor lady was to render had been made clear to her. Mrs.
Munden left me in any case with the rather droll image of her faring forth
across the sea quite consciously and resignedly to perform it.

The point of the communication had however been that my sitter was again
looking up and would doubtless, on the arrival and due initiation of Mrs.
Brash, be in form really to wait on me. The situation must further, to my