"Eh? Step-mother, isn't it?"

"You seem to know a lot about her. She says 'mother'--Lady Osprey.
They're to call on me, anyhow, next Wednesday week at four, and there's
got to be you for tea."

"Eh?"

"You--for tea.

"H'm. She had rather--force of character. When I knew her before."

I became aware of my aunt's head sticking out obliquely from behind the
coffee-machine and regarding me with wide blue curiosity. I met her gaze
for a moment, flinched, coloured, and laughed.

"I've known her longer than I've known you," I said, and explained at
length.

My aunt kept her eye on me over and round the coffee-machine as I did
so. She was greatly interested, and asked several elucidatory questions.

"Why didn't you tell me the day you saw her? You've had her on your mind
for a week," she said.

"It IS odd I didn't tell you," I admitted.

"You thought I'd get a Down on her," said my aunt conclusively. "That's
what you thought" and opened the rest of her letters.

The two ladies came in a pony-carriage with conspicuous punctuality, and
I had the unusual experience of seeing my aunt entertaining callers. We
had tea upon the terrace under the cedar, but old Lady Osprey, being an
embittered Protestant, had never before seen the inside of the house,
and we made a sort of tour of inspection that reminded me of my first
visit to the place. In spite of my preoccupation with Beatrice, I stored
a queer little memory of the contrast between the two other women; my
aunt, tall, slender and awkward, in a simple blue homekeeping dress, an
omnivorous reader and a very authentic wit, and the lady of pedigree,
short and plump, dressed with Victorian fussiness, living at the
intellectual level of palmistry and genteel fiction, pink in the face
and generally flustered by a sense of my aunt's social strangeness and
disposed under the circumstances to behave rather like an imitation
of the more queenly moments of her own cook. The one seemed made of
whalebone, the other of dough. My aunt was nervous, partly through the
intrinsic difficulty of handling the lady and partly because of her
passionate desire to watch Beatrice and me, and her nervousness took a
common form with her, a wider clumsiness of gesture and an exacerbation
of her habitual oddity of phrase which did much to deepen the pink
perplexity of the lady of title. For instance, I heard my aunt admit
that one of the Stuart Durgan ladies did look a bit "balmy on
the crumpet";