"Capers and nonsense," she said, "Juliana has never had an illness in her
life."

She said it to Rhoda Vivian, the bold young person who had taken upon
herself to bring the doctor into the house. Mrs. Moon spoke of the doctor
as if he was a disease.

Fortunately Miss Vivian was by when he endured the first terrifying
encounter. Her manner suggested that she took him under her protection,
stood between him and some unfathomable hostility.

He found the Old Lady disentangling herself with immense dignity from her
maze of furniture. Mrs. Moon was a small woman shrunk with her eighty
years, shrunk almost to extinction in her black woollen gown and black
woollen mittens. Her very face seemed to be vanishing under the immense
shadow of her black net cap. Spirals of thin grey hair stuck flat to her
forehead; she wore other and similar spirals enclosed behind glass in an
enormous brooch; it was the hair of her ancestors, that is to say of the
Quinceys. As the Old Lady looked at Cautley her little black eyes burned
like pinpoints pierced in a paste-board mask.

"I think you've been brought here on a wild goose chase, doctor," said
she, "there is nothing the matter with my niece."

He replied (battling sternly with his desire to laugh) that he would be
delighted if it were so; adding that a wild goose chase was the sport he
preferred to any other.

Here he looked at Miss Vivian to the imminent peril of his self-control.