It finished off the
strange figure of Mrs. Oke, as I saw it in my imagination--this _bizarre_
creature of enigmatic, far-fetched exquisiteness--that she should have no
interest in the present, but only an eccentric passion in the past. It
seemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes, to her
irrelevant and far-off smile. It was like the words to a weird piece of
gipsy music, this that she, who was so different, so distant from all women
of her own time, should try and identify herself with a woman of the
past--that she should have a kind of flirtation--But of this anon.
I told Mrs. Oke that I had learnt from her husband the outline of the
tragedy, or mystery, whichever it was, of Alice Oke, daughter of Virgil
Pomfret, and the poet Christopher Lovelock. That look of vague contempt, of
a desire to shock, which I had noticed before, came into her beautiful,
pale, diaphanous face.
"I suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole matter," she
said--"told it you with as little detail as possible, and assured you
very solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadful
calumny? Poor Willie! I remember already when we were children, and I
used to come with my mother to spend Christmas at Okehurst, and my cousin
was down here for his holidays, how I used to horrify him by insisting
upon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs, and playing the story of the
wicked Mrs.
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