He was not even sure at first that it had been made quite seriously. He wondered vaguely what the somewhat conventional-looking elderly woman – to judge from her photograph – who was Henrietta’s mother, would have thought of the remark. Glancing again at her photograph where it stood on the window-ledge in that frame intended to hold three pictures but in which her own was now solitary, he was more struck this time by the quality of the sketches flanking it. For a moment he thought he saw in them a curiously vivid and exceptional quality, and then he looked again and thought they were quite simple and ordinary little things, such as almost anyone could produce, with a certain fancifulness in their manner that made them unlike anything he ever remembered seeing in nature. He jerked his mind back from them to what Henrietta had just told him and said: “You don’t mean –” He paused, uncertain how to complete his sentence, and she answered: “I just thought you ought to know, perhaps.
