I grew more impatient. I wanted to get out of this stage into something
more personal. I thought she invented this sort of stuff to keep me from
getting at her errand at Callan's. But I didn't want to know her errand;
I wanted to make love to her. As for Fox and Gurnard and Churchill, the
Foreign Minister, who really was a sympathetic character and did stand
for political probity, she might be uttering allegorical truths, but I
was not interested in them. I wanted to start some topic that would lead
away from this Dimensionist farce.

"My dear sister," I began.... Callan always moved about like a
confounded eavesdropper, wore carpet slippers, and stepped round the
corners of screens. I expect he got copy like that.

"So, she's your sister?" he said suddenly, from behind me. "Strange that
you shouldn't recognise the handwriting...."

"Oh, we don't correspond," I said light-heartedly, "we are _so_
different." I wanted to take a rise out of the creeping animal that he
was. He confronted her blandly.

"You must be the little girl that I remember," he said. He had known my
parents ages ago. That, indeed, was how I came to know him; I wouldn't
have chosen him for a friend. "I thought Granger said you were dead ...
but one gets confused...."

"Oh, we see very little of each other," she answered. "Arthur might
have said I was dead--he's capable of anything, you know." She spoke
with an assumption of sisterly indifference that was absolutely
striking. I began to think she must be an actress of genius, she did it