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But Sir William Bradshaw stopped at the door and looked at a picture. He glanced into the corner to find the engraver’s signature, and his wife looked too. Sir William Bradshaw had a keen interest in art.

Peter said that when one was young, one was too excited to really know other people. Now that one was old—well, fifty-two to be exact (Sally said she was fifty-five in body, but twenty in heart); now that one’s mind was mature, he said, one could observe, one could understand, without losing the power to feel. Sally agreed, yes, that was true. She felt her emotions growing deeper and more intense with each passing year. Peter sighed, well, perhaps that was so, but one ought to be grateful for it—this capacity for feeling that grew richer with the years. He had met someone in India, he wanted to tell Sally about her, wanted Sally to know her. She was married, he said, with two young children. Sally immediately said they must come to Manchester, and he must promise that before he left.

Peter brought up Elizabeth again: “Her feelings are not half as deep as ours, not yet anyway.” But Sally said that watching Elizabeth walk toward her father, one could see the profound affection between father and daughter, could feel it in the way Elizabeth moved toward him.

For her father had been talking to the Bradshaws just now, and when he turned, he thought: Who is this lovely girl? Then he realized it was his own Elizabeth—he had not recognized her at first, in her pink dress! Elizabeth felt her father’s gaze and walked toward him, and the two of them stood together, watching as the guests left one by one, the room growing emptier and emptier, with odds and ends scattered across the floor. Even Ellie Henderson was almost gone, one of the last to leave, though no one had spoken to her—she always wanted to see everything, to go back and tell Edith all about it. Richard and Eli

2026-01-12

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