She would lie back in a
big seventeenth-century armchair while I played the piano, with that
strange smile every now and then in her thin cheeks, that strange whiteness
in her eyes; but it seemed a matter of indifference whether my music
stopped or went on. In my portrait of her husband she did not take, or
pretend to take, the very faintest interest; but that was nothing to me. I
did not want Mrs. Oke to think me interesting; I merely wished to go on
studying her.
The first time that Mrs. Oke seemed to become at all aware of my presence
as distinguished from that of the chairs and tables, the dogs that lay in
the porch, or the clergyman or lawyer or stray neighbour who was
occasionally asked to dinner, was one day--I might have been there a
week--when I chanced to remark to her upon the very singular resemblance
that existed between herself and the portrait of a lady that hung in the
hall with the ceiling like a ship's hull. The picture in question was a
full length, neither very good nor very bad, probably done by some stray
Italian of the early seventeenth century. It hung in a rather dark corner,
facing the portrait, evidently painted to be its companion, of a dark man,
with a somewhat unpleasant expression of resolution and efficiency, in a
black Vandyck dress.
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