:

"Where's Doctor Brooke?"

Dick evaded it by the self-evident statement that he hadn't come, and
ended in a morass of frowning confusion.

Mrs. Powell turned to her with a surprised interrogation, a doubtful
warmth. It tried subtly to convey an entire acceptance of her as an
individual, combined with disapproval of finding her in the spot she had
no excuse for seeking. And while they were exchanging civil commonplaces
veiling unspoken implications, Raven was looking at his sister and
thinking, in a whimsical terror, what a very large grain of sand she was
likely to prove in the machinery of his daily life, and how little she
had changed during his absence from America. Here she was, so
indomitable in every particular that you could almost believe she was
going to be as lasting as the processes that went to her equipment. She
had, you learned to know, tackled life as a servant to be governed, an
enemy to be downed. If it had antidotes, she would lose no moment in
equipping herself with them. If circumstance proved unfriendly, she
would ignore it and forge ahead. She was, Raven had always recognized,
the feminine replica of his father's special type. As to her looks, she
was a thin, whip-like woman, who gave an impression of wiry endurance
and serviceable resiliency. You would expect her to be hard to the
touch, mental or moral, and yet she could double, evade, rebound. Put
her in a hole, and she soon proved to you that its obscurity was the
last place where she proposed to stay. She looked the latest thing
evolved by the art of man. Her clothes were the prevailing fantastic
creation, and yet, on her, they were not illogical. They were the
plumage of an eccentric bird hatched to look that way. Her face, in its
sandy monotone of color, fitted the art of her wonderful and yet not too
noticeable hat, and her gloves and veil were the last word of style.
Amelia had begun making herself, Raven used to think, long before God
stopped making her. As a girl, she had gone after strange gods of
culture and aestheticism, forsaking them, when they toppled, for newer
gods still; but always she was undaunted, always persisting in her
determined pose of governing the situation and her own attitude toward
it. And Amelia, he knew, could hang on like grim death.

"But Nan!" she was exclaiming, "who'd have expected to find you here?"

"Well," said Nan, in the shock of realizing she hadn't quite remembered
what Amelia was like, and rang