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chapter 3 of a phantom lover by vernon lee this is a librivox recording all librivox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit librivox.org

from that moment i began to assume a certain interest in the eyes of mrs oak or rather i began to perceive that i had a means of securing her attention perhaps it was wrong of me to do so and i have often reproached myself very seriously later on but after all how was i to guess that i was making mischief merely by chiming in for the sake of the portrait i had undertaken and of a very harmless psychological mania with what was merely the fad the little romantic affectation or eccentricity of a scatterbrained and eccentric young woman how in the world should i have dreamed that i was handling explosive substances a man is surely not responsible if the people with whom he is forced to deal and whom he deals with as with all the rest of the world are quite different from all other human creatures so if indeed i did at all conduce to mischief i really cannot blame myself i had met in mrs oak an almost unique subject for a portrait painter of any particular sort and a most singular bizarre personality i could not possibly do my subject justice so long as i was kept at a distance prevented from studying the real character of the woman i required to put her into play and i ask you whether any more innocent way of doing so could be found than talking to a woman and letting her talk about an absurd fancy she had for a couple of ancestors of hers of the time of charles the first and a poet whom they had murdered particularly as i studiously respected the prejudices of my host and refrained from mentioning the matter and tried to restrain mrs oak from doing so in the presence of william oak himself i had certainly guessed correctly to resemble the alice oak of the year 1626 was the caprice the mania the pose though whatever you may call it of the alice oak of 1880 and to perceive this resemblance was the sure way of gaining her good graces it was the most extraordinary craze of all the extraordinary crazes of childless and idol women that i have ever met but it was more than that it was admirably characteristic it finished off the strange figure of mrs oak as i saw it in my imagination this bizarre creature of enigmatic far-fetched exquisiteness that she should have no interest in the present but only an eccentric passion in the past it seemed to give the meaning to the absent look in her eyes to her irrelevant and far-off smile it was like the words to a weird piece of gypsy music this that she who was so different so distant from all women of her own time should try and identify herself with a woman of the past that she should have a kind of flirtation but of this anon i told mrs oak that i had learned from her husband the outline of the tragedy or mystery whichever it was of alice oak daughter of virgil pomfret and the poet christopher lovelock that look of vague contempt of a desire to shock which i had noticed before came into her beautiful pale diaphanous face i suppose my husband was very shocked at the whole matter she said told it you with as little detail as possible and assured you very solemnly that he hoped the whole story might be a mere dreadful columny poor wheelie i remember already when we were children and i used to come with my mother to spend christmas at oakhurst and my cousin was down here for his holidays how i used to horrify him by insisting upon dressing up in shawls and waterproofs and playing the story of the wicked mrs oak and he always piously refused to do the part of nicholas when i wanted to have the scene on coates common i didn't know then that i was like the original alice oak i found it out only after our marriage you really think that i am she certainly was particularly at that moment as she stood in a white van dyke dress with the green of the park...