'I have just met her,' I said, 'though I can't recall much about her. She just seemed the Female Don in person. Why do those women have to look like that?'

'Those women!' Georgie laughed. 'I'm one of them now, darling! Anyway, she certainly has power in her.'

'You have power without looking like a haystack!'

'Me?' said Georgie. 'I'm not in that class. I don't carry half so many guns.'

'You said I was carried away by the brother. You seem to be carried away by the sister.'

'Oh, I don't like her,' said Georgie. 'That's another matter.'

She sat up abruptly and retrieved her hair and began very rapidly to plait it. She tossed the heavy plait back over her shoulder. Then she hitched up her skirt and some layers of stiff white petticoat and began to draw on a pair of peacock-blue stockings which I had given her. I loved to give Georgie outrageous things, absurd garments and gewgaws which I could not possibly have given Antonia, barbarous necklaces and velvet pants and purple underwear and black openwork tights, which drove me mad. I rose now and wandered about the room, watching her possessively as with a tense demure consciousness of my gaze she adjusted the lurid stockings.

Georgie's room, a large untidy bed-sitting-room which looked out on to what was virtually an alleyway in the proximity of Covent Garden, was full of things which I had given her. I had for long, and vainly, waged a battle with Georgie's relentless lack of taste. The numerous Italian prints, French paperweights, pieces of Derby, Worcester, Coleport, Spode, Copeland, and other bric-a-brac – for I hardly ever arrived without bringing something – lay about, for all my efforts, in a dusty hurly-burly more reminiscent of a junk shop than a civilized room. Georgie was, somehow, not designed by nature to possess things. Whereas when Antonia or I bought anything, which we constantly did, it found its place at once in the rich and highly integrated mosaic of our surroundings, Georgie seemed to have no such carapace.