Alice, who had been wondering nothing of the sort, saw with surprise that the woman's thin lips smiled, almost triumphantly. "But I know my way perfectly in this house," she said. "Never worry about that." She seemed to unbend a little as if this topic were welcome. "I have been totally bluid for many years, but I do not let my affliction prevent me from moving about this house with complete confidence."
"Why, that's wonderful!" breathed Alice. "I do think that's wonderful. Miss Whitlock."
Innes beamed. Alice knew she'd caught on quickly, that this was what she ought to be saying.
"I simply resolved," Gertrude said and Alice recognized a worn quality in the phrase, "that I would never be a burden. Nor have I been." The blind woman sat down in a chair near the fire. She picked up an elegant box lying close to her hand. "Do you smoke, Miss Brennan?" she said pleasantly, holding the box quite accurately in Alice's direction.
"I do, thank you." Alice reached out her hand. Then she saw with dismay that the box was empty. The blind woman was showing off, and she had made a mistake.
For the space of half a second, Alice hesitated. Then she fumbled in her jacket pocket with her left hand. "I don't like to take the last one," she said with an apologetic and rather timid laugh. She dipped her hand into the box, letting the woman feel its pressure.
Innes leaped forward with a match and lit the cigarette Alice had pulled from her own pocket. "Let me," he said gallantly. "Gertrude is marvelous, really, isn't she?" His eyes congratulated Alice and thanked her, too.
Alice leaned back with a little glow in her heart. She was pleased with herself for having thought so quickly how to save the blind woman's pride and still warn her not to make the same mistake again. Having done Gertrude a service, in a way, Alice felt warmer toward her.
But Gertrude said, rather petulantly, "It ought to be full. Josephine is not quite all there is to be desired in a servant. It is very difficult, you can imagine . . ."
"Yes, indeed," murmured Alice.
"The girls who are willing to go into domestic service are quite untrained," Gertrude went on, "and quite im-trainable, I'm afraid."
Alice murmured again. The conversation seemed to her to have taken a queer turn. It was peculiar to sit here and discuss Gertrude's servant problem when the news of the moment was surely Innes's unexpected arrival and Alice's introduction to this house. But, she told herself, Gertrude Whidock's world was dark and limited.
"Josephine does very well, Gertrude," Innes said soothingly. "The house looks well. Just as it always did."
Gertrude sighed. "Innes," she said, "I wish you would speak to Maud and Isabel. I do not understand it. I, alone, am maintaining the house again. I am perfectly willing to do so. You realize that."
"I know," Innes said angrily. "I know aU about it." Faint pink came up under his skin and his eyes looked sullen.
"Yet I seem to have less and less," Gertrude went on, scarcely heeding; "and really, we cannot do without servants. Even if it would look well, which it would not."
"Good heavens, of course you can't do without servants," Innes cried. "Tell me—the same old thing, I suppose?"
"They say they cannot share," Gertrude shrugged. "I haven't doubted them. I don't care to discuss it, naturally."
"You haven't gone into your capital?"
"The bank will know. I know nothing about that sort of thing." Gertrude Implied that no lady would.
Innes clicked his tongue.
"But how sordid," Gertrude said suddenly. "Forgive me, Miss Brennan. This must come under the head of business and you do imderstand business, I suppose. I don't see Innes often. I must snatch a moment."
"Tm a bad boy," Innes said with his pout. He had a way of being whimsical about his own shortcomings.
The blind woman pursed her dry lips. "Of course, Innes is Stephen's son but not Sophia's," she said, as if this explained something. "That is Sophia, hanging over the mantel."
Startled, AKce looked up. Sophia was, indeed, hanging on the wall but looking as if she had never been alive at all. A pale oval face, stiffly done by a bad artist, it had a kind of crookedness to it, as if the artist had lost control of what little skill he had and gotten the perspective wrong. One eye looked insolently at the beholder, as eyes do in such portraits, but the other rolled a little wUdly, as if it looked elsewhere. No, not elsewhere, but inward, as if half the woman dreamed.
"An excellent likeness of my mother," Gertrude said complacently.
There was sound on the stairs of feet plopping flat on each step and a dumpy figure appeared in the arch. Innes stepped quickly forth, took the newcomer's hand and swung it, making a little bow at the same time. "My sister, Maud."
The dumpy one chuckled. "Surprise, eh, Innes?" she said in a rasping voice, a queerly masculine voice, harsh and unpleasant and toneless. "You don't drop in like this so often."
Alice thought immediately of the Duchess in Through the Looking Glass, or was it Wonderland? Her nose was an untidy pug. Her hair was a rat's nest. Alice found a moment to wonder how anyone could deliberately go to work and arrange a head of hair like that. It was snarled and twisted into a pagoda full of hairpins, and there was no logic in it. Maud's skin was gray and hung on her face in folds. She wore a black dress embellished with tags of lace as illogical and haphazard as the arrangement of her hair. Her fat ankles were bound into high white shoes which, Alice saw, not without shock, were dirty and yellowish. She came closer, and her lively little gray eyes peered curiously at the girl.
"How ja do?" said Maud and stuck out a slab of a hand. The puffy flesh ended in dirty fingernails. Alice winced. Her nostrils twitched, then she stopped breathing; for from sister Maud arose an odor, definitely an odor; and, although fainter, it was the same rank animal smell she had noticed before.
"How do you do. Miss . . . Miss Maud," Alice foundered, looking desperately to Innes. "Is that proper?" She heard herself giving a very nervous litde laugh. "I can't
very well call you both Miss Whitlock. I . . ."
But Maud was looking at Innes, and her harsh, unlovely voice cut through Alice's sentence and stopped it.
"Who's the girl?" she said. "Where'd you find her?"
Blood rose in Alice's face. The blind woman said quietly, ''My sister Maud is quite deaf. Miss Brennan. She doesn't hear you at all."
Alice had trouble to draw her breath smoothly. "Thank you," she panted. "I didn't know."
"She is really rather helpless," said Gertrude contemptuously.
Innes had been spelling on his fingers. Maud's little eyes turned to the girl. They were bright and peered from folds of her grayish flesh.
"Secretary, eh?" she said bluntly. She waddled over to the chair in which Alice had been sitting. She collapsed into it. Her fat little body simply melted its bones and fell down. She stretched her ugly legs out and looked up at the mantel. Innes reached for the candy box. He did this automatically and handed it down. Maud dipped her fingers in.
"Have some candy?" she said to Alice, who shuddered "No." The woman stuffed three pieces into her mouth and grinned at the same time.
"Look here, Maud . . . Excuse me, Alice." Innes snatched a pad of paper from the incomprehensible folds of the woman's dress and produced a pencil. He scribbled.
"What's that?" Maud said, regarding what he had written without much interest. "Oh, financial, eh?" She grinned. "My financial position. Innes, you're a card."
He tapped the paper with his forefinger, impatiently. He was quite ready to dominate this sister.
"I've still got the two Liberty Bonds," Maud said. "Isabel hid them on me. " She went into rusty laughter.
Innes pantomined.
"Oh, I dunno," Maud said. "Spent it, I guess. Eh?" She took another chocolate. "It goes," she said slobbering and sucking in the overflow with a loud slupp, "Isabel's the one. She never spent an easy cent in her life, and it goes just the same." Maud heaved with mirth. "Makes her pretty mad. Should think it would."