"
"Yes," said Aunt Victoria, "that was how it happened.... Pauline, get
out the massage cream and do my face, will you?"
She did not talk any more for a time, but when she began, it was again
of Lydford that she spoke, running along in a murmured stream of
reminiscences breathed faintly between motionless lips that Pauline's
reverent ministrations might not be disturbed. Through the veil of
these half-understood recollections, Sylvia saw highly inaccurate
pictures of great magnificent rooms filled with heavy old mahogany
furniture, of riotously colored rose-gardens, terraced and
box-edged, inhabited by beautiful ladies always, like Aunt Victoria,
"dressed-up," who took tea under brightly striped, pagoda-shaped
tents, waited upon by slant-eyed Japanese (it seemed Aunt Victoria had
nothing but Japanese servants). The whole picture shimmered in the
confused imagination of the listening little girl, till it blended
indistinguishably with the enchantment of her fairy-stories. It all
seemed a background natural enough for Aunt Victoria, but Sylvia could
not fit her father into it.
"Ah, he's changed greatly--he's transformed--he is not the same
creature," Aunt Victoria told her gravely, speaking according to her
seductive habit with Sylvia, as though to an equal. "The year when
we lost our money and he married, altered all the world for us."
She linked the two events together, and was rewarded by seeing the
reference slide over Sylvia's head.
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