This evening Irma had been more tiresome than ever. What was it, she had inquired, over and over again, which prevented her from meeting someone who could appreciate and admire her? She did not want him, this hypothetical admirer, necessarily to dedicate his 'whole' life to her, for a man must have his work - (as long as it didn't take too long) - mustn't he? But if he was wealthy and 'wished' to dedicate his life to her - well, she wouldn't make promises, but would give the proposal a fair hearing. She had her long, unblemished neck. Her bosom was flat, it was true, and so were her feet, but after all a woman can't leave everything. 'I 'move' well, don't I, Alfred?' she had cried in a sudden passion. 'I say. I 'move' well?'
Her brother, whose long pink face had been propped on his long white hand, raised his eyes from the tablecloth on which he had been drawing the skeleton of an ostrich. His mouth opened automatically into something that had more of a yawn than a smile about it, but a great many teeth were flashed. His smooth jaws came together again, and as he looked at his sister he pondered for the thousandth time upon the maddening coincidence of being saddled with such a sister. It being the thousandth time, he was well practised, and his ponder lasted no more than a couple of rueful seconds. But in those seconds he saw again the stark idiocy of her thin, lipless mouth, the twitching fatuity of the skin under her eyes, the roaring repression that could do no more than bleat through her voice; the smooth, blank forehead (from which the coarse, luxuriant masses of her iron- grey hair were strained back over her cranium, to meet in the compact huddle of a bun as hard as a boulder) - that forehead which was like the smoothly plastered front of an empty house, deserted save by the ghost of a bird-like tenant which hopped about in the dust and preened its feathers in front of tarnished mirrors.
'Lord! Lord!' he thought, 'why, out of all the globe's creatures, should I, innocent of murder, be punished in this way?'
He grinned again. This time there was nothing of the yawn left in the process. His jaws opened out like a crocodile's. How could any human head contain such terrible and dazzling teeth? It was a brand-new graveyard. But oh! how anonymous it was. Not a headstone chiselled with the owner's name. Had they died in battle, these nameless, dateless, dental dead, whose memorials, when the jaws opened, gleamed in the sunlight, and when the jaws met again rubbed shoulders in the night, scraping an ever closer acquaintance as the years rolled by? Prunesquallor had smiled. For he had found relief in the notion that there were several worse things imaginable than being saddled with his sister metaphorically, and one of them was that he should have been saddled with her in all its literal horror. For his imagination had caught a startlingly vivid glimpse of her upon his back, her flat feet in the stirrups, her heels digging into his flanks as, careering round the table on all fours with the bit in his mouth and with his haunches being cross-hatched with the flicks of her whip, he galloped his miserable life away.
'When I ask you a question, Alfred - I say when I ask you a question, Alfred, I like to think that you can be civil enough, even if you 'are' my brother, to answer me instead of smirking to yourself.'
Now if there was one thing that the doctor could never do it was to smirk. His face was the wrong shape. His muscles moved in another way altogether.
'Sister mine,' he said, 'since thus you are, forgive, if you can, your brother. He waits breathlessly your answer to his question. It is this, my turtle-dove. 'What did you say to him?' For he has forgotten so utterly that were his death dependent on it, he would be forced to live - with you, his fruit-drop, with you alone.'
Irma never listened beyond the first five words of her brother's somewhat involved periods, and so a great many insults passed over her head. Insults, not vicious in themselves, they provided the Doctor with a form of verbal self-amusement without which he would have to remain locked in his study the entire time. And, in any case, it wasn't a study, for although its walls were lined with books, it held nothing else beyond a very comfortable arm-chair and a very beautiful carpet. There was no writing-desk. No paper or ink. Not even a wastepaper basket.
'What was it you asked me, flesh of my flesh? I will do what I can for you.'
'I have been saying, Alfred, that I am not without charm. Nor without grace, or intellect. Why is it I am never approached? Why do I never have advances made to me?'
'Are you speaking financially?' asked the doctor.
'I am speaking spiritually, Alfred, and you know it. What have others got that I haven't?'
'Or conversely,' said Prunesquallor, 'what haven't they got that you already have?'
'I don't follow you,' Alfred. I said I don't follow you.'
'That's just what you do do,' said her brother, reaching out his arms and fluttering his fingers. 'And I wish you'd stop it.'
'But my deportment, Alfred. Haven't you noticed it? What's wrong with your sex - can't they see I 'move' well?'
'Perhaps we're too spiritual,' said Doctor Prunesquallor.
'But my carriage! Alfred, my carriage!'
'Too powerful, sweet white-of-egg, far too powerful; you lurch from side to side of life's drear highway: those hips of yours rotating as you go. Oh, no, my dear one, your carriage scares them off, that's what it does. You terrify them, Irma.'
This was too much for her.
'You've never 'believed' in me!' she cried, rising from the table, and a dreadful blush suffusing her perfect skin. 'But I can tell you' - her voice rose to a shrill scream - ''that I'm a lady'! What do you think I want with 'men'? The beasts! I hate them. Blind, stupid, clumsy, horrible, heavy, vulgar things they are. And you're 'one' of them!' she screamed, pointing at her brother, who, with his eyebrows raised a little, was continuing with his drawing of the ostrich from where he had left off. 'And 'you' are one of them! Do you hear me, Alfred, one of 'them'!'
The pitch of her voice had brought a servant to the door. Unwisely, he had opened it, ostensibly to ask whether she had rung for him, but in reality to see what was going on.
Irma's throat was quivering like a bowstring.
'What have ladies to do with men?' she screamed; and then, catching sight of the face of the servant at the door, she plucked a knife from the table and flung it at the face. But her aim was not all it might have been, possibly because she was so involved in being a lady, and the knife impaled itself on the ceiling immediately above her own head, where it gave a perfect imitation of the shuddering of her throat.
The doctor, adding with deliberation the last vertebra to the tail of the skeleton ostrich, turned his
