“I can see you have not the Erskine Feet,” she said, glancing at Joanna’s, “though they are well enough shaped and not large. But look at mine. Though I am over fifty, they are as they were when I was seventeen. And see!”

Eagerly unfastening Joanna’s slippers, and standing on the rough boards in her scarlet stocking soles, Aunt Perdy sprang right on to the tips of her pretty toes like a ballerina, and stayed there poised for perhaps ten seconds, her arms outstretched and her fine serious face thrown back in triumph.

It was true. She had marvellous feet, small, and with strongly curved insteps. On coming into the house she had laid aside her mannish cap and the dolman, and Joanna thought she looked stranger than ever. Her light brown hair, in which were only a few threads of grey, was cut in a straight fringe starting far up on the crown and coming almost to her eyebrows. Her eyes could at any moment, and apparently at will, fill with fire; and in spite of its many fine wrinkles and the absence of colour from the cheeks, her face was indomitably youthful. Both face and neck were of an even, yellowish tint. Her breast was full and deep. Only in a careless sagging of the stomach and thickening of the hips did she show her age.

The next moment she was unrolling and measuring Juley’s tweed to make sure there was enough for a new winter dress. The amount hardly satisfied her, and she began to examine Joanna’s crape-edged skirt to see if it would do as a pattern.

“How queer the fashions are now,” she exclaimed, keenly interested, but with some disgust in her voice. “Are they really wearing such skirts in Florence? I think them ugly and immodest, fitting so closely round the hips. You have the Erskine figure, Joanna. Our women always had good, well-grown bodies. Turn round, and let me look at you. Yes, you are well set up, and have a good complexion like your mother, though she was never so pretty as you. But I had a fuller bosom at your age. A woman should be big-breasted, the Italian men say. And I think they are right.”

“Mother has sometimes said I am like you,” ventured Joanna, who hardly knew what to do with herself under her aunt’s scrutiny.