Mrs. Medwin

CHAPTER I

"Well, we ARE a pair!" the poor lady's visitor broke out to her at
the end of her explanation in a manner disconcerting enough. The
poor lady was Miss Cutter, who lived in South Audley Street, where
she had an "upper half" so concise that it had to pass boldly for
convenient; and her visitor was her half-brother, whom she hadn't
seen for three years. She was remarkable for a maturity of which
every symptom might have been observed to be admirably controlled,
had not a tendency to stoutness just affirmed its independence.
Her present, no doubt, insisted too much on her past, but with the
excuse, sufficiently valid, that she must certainly once have been
prettier. She was clearly not contented with once--she wished to
be prettier again. She neglected nothing that could produce that
illusion, and, being both fair and fat, dressed almost wholly in
black. When she added a little colour it was not, at any rate, to
her drapery. Her small rooms had the peculiarity that everything
they contained appeared to testify with vividness to her position
in society, quite as if they had been furnished by the bounty of
admiring friends. They were adorned indeed almost exclusively with
objects that nobody buys, as had more than once been remarked by
spectators of her own sex, for herself, and would have been
luxurious if luxury consisted mainly in photographic portraits
slashed across with signatures, in baskets of flowers beribboned
with the cards of passing compatriots, and in a neat collection of
red volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical volumes, aids to London
lucidity, of every sort, devoted to addresses and engagements. To
be in Miss Cutter's tiny drawing-room, in short, even with Miss
Cutter alone--should you by any chance have found her so--was
somehow to be in the world and in a crowd. It was like an agency--
it bristled with particulars.

This was what the tall lean loose gentleman lounging there before
her might have appeared to read in the suggestive scene over which,
while she talked to him, his eyes moved without haste and without
rest. "Oh come, Mamie!" he occasionally threw off; and the words
were evidently connected with the impression thus absorbed. His
comparative youth spoke of waste even as her positive--her too
positive--spoke of economy. There was only one thing, that is, to
make up in him for everything he had lost, though it was distinct
enough indeed that this thing might sometimes serve. It consisted
in the perfection of an indifference, an indifference at the
present moment directed to the plea--a plea of inability, of pure
destitution--with which his sister had met him. Yet it had even
now a wider embrace, took in quite sufficiently all