London, which never remembers anything clearly for long, never wholly forgets, and this spring when Edith Allbutt had appeared again, staying at Rye House with her sister, it faintly recollected these facts and commented on them. It really was almost worth while to live twelve years with a dreadful little man like that if at the end you came out at the age of over forty looking like Juno. She was so pleasant too, so agreeable, she had such distinction of a kind that was rather rare nowadays, when everybody played bridge with one hand while they played croquet with the other, and talked all the time with their mouths full of a vegetarian diet. She was the sort of person--magnetic, is it not?--of whom one is always conscious. In a way utterly opposite to Peggy’s, she gave the impression of immense vitality. What had she been doing with herself during these three years in the country, where nobody had seen her, to make her like that? Above all, what was she going to do with herself now?
It seemed then that, dissimilar as the two sisters were, the family likeness between them did exist somewhere very essentially, for if there was one thing for which Peggy was distinguished it was vitality of a kind that made everybody else seem rather like molluscs. And though very differently manifested, this vitality seemed to be equally characteristic of her sister, who had not retired to a bath-chair or a cemetery, but had come out again unimpaired and serenely splendid from what would have driven most women out of their minds.