Dona Rita was curious to know how I got on with her peasant sister and all I could say in return for that inquiry was that the peasant sister was in her own way amiable.  At this she clicked her tongue amusingly and repeated a remark she had made before:  “She likes young men.  The younger the better.”  The mere thought of those two women being sisters aroused one’s wonder.  Physically they were altogether of different design.  It was also the difference between living tissue of glowing loveliness with a divine breath, and a hard hollow figure of baked clay.

Indeed Therese did somehow resemble an achievement, wonderful enough in its way, in unglazed earthenware.  The only gleam perhaps that one could find on her was that of her teeth, which one used to get between her dull lips unexpectedly, startlingly, and a little inexplicably, because it was never associated with a smile.  She smiled with compressed mouth.  It was indeed difficult to conceive of those two birds coming from the same nest.  And yet . . .  Contrary to what generally happens, it was when one saw those two women together that one lost all belief in the possibility of their relationship near or far.  It extended even to their common humanity.  One, as it were, doubted it.  If one of the two was representative, then the other was either something more or less than human.  One wondered whether these two women belonged to the same scheme of creation.  One was secretly amazed to see them standing together, speaking to each other, having words in common, understanding each other.  And yet! . . .  Our psychological sense is the crudest of all; we don’t know, we don’t perceive how superficial we are.  The simplest shades escape us, the secret of changes, of relations.  No, upon the whole, the only feature (and yet with enormous differences) which Therese had in common with her sister, as I told Dona Rita, was amiability.

“For, you know, you are a most amiable person yourself,” I went on.  “It’s one of your characteristics, of course much more precious than in other people.  You transmute the commonest traits into gold of your own; but after all there are no new names.  You are amiable.  You were most amiable to me when I first saw you.”

“Really.  I was not aware.  Not specially . . . "

“I had never the presumption to think that it was special.  Moreover, my head was in a whirl.  I was lost in astonishment first of all at what I had been listening to all night.  Your history, you know, a wonderful tale with a flavour of wine in it and wreathed in clouds, with that amazing decapitated, mutilated dummy of a woman lurking in a corner, and with Blunt’s smile gleaming through a fog, the fog in my eyes, from Mills’ pipe, you know.  I was feeling quite inanimate as to body and frightfully stimulated as to mind all the time.  I had never heard anything like that talk about you before.  Of course I wasn’t sleepy, but still I am not used to do altogether without sleep like Blunt . . .”