The hardest thing for Eugenia about these terribly hard days of suspense was to keep her self-control in her own room.  Of course for her as for any civilized being, it was always possible to keep herself in hand with people looking on.  But for years she had not had to struggle so when alone, for poise and self-mastery.  Her room at the Crittendens’, which had been hers so long, and which Marise had let her furnish with her own things, was no longer the haven of refuge it had been from the bitter, raw crudity of the Vermont life.  She tried to fill the empty hours of Neale’s daily absences from the house with some of the fastidious, delicate occupations of which she had so many, but they seemed brittle in her hot hands, and broke when she tried to lean on them.  A dozen times a day she interrupted herself to glance with apprehension at her reflection in the mirror, the Florentine mirror with the frame of brown wood carved, with the light, restrained touch of a good period, into those tasteful slender columns.  And every time she looked, she was horrified and alarmed to see deep lines of thought, of hope, of impatience, of emotion, criss-crossing fatally on her face.

Then she would sit down before her curving dressing-table, gather the folds of her Persian room-dress about her, lift up her soul and go through those mental and physical relaxing exercises which the wonderful lecturer of last winter had explained.  She let her head and shoulders and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the crass rigidity of a growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things; the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human note of their tilted corners; Arabian traceries; cunningly wrought, depraved wood-carvings in the corners of Gothic cathedrals; the gay and amusing pink rotundities of a Boucher ceiling.  When she felt her face calm and unlined again, she put on a little massage cream, to make doubly sure, and rubbed it along where the lines of emotion had been.

But half an hour afterwards, as she lay stretched in the chaise-longue by the window, reading Claudel, or Strindberg, or Remy de Gourmont, she would suddenly find that she was not thinking of what was on the page, that she saw there only Marise’s troubled eyes while she and Marsh talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the foolishness of the parents’ notion that they would be formative elements in the children’s lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did succeed in forcing themselves into the children’s lives, the danger of sexual mother-complexes.  Eugenia found that instead of thrilling voluptuously, as she knew she ought, to the precious pain and bewilderment of one of the thwarted characters of James Joyce, she was,