with a disconcerting and painful eagerness of her own, bringing up to mind the daunted silence Marise kept when they mentioned the fact that of course everybody nowadays knew that children are much better off in a big, numerous, robust group than in the nervous, tight isolation of family life; and that a really trained educator could look out for them much better than any mother, because he could let them alone as a mother never could.

She found that such evocations of facts poignantly vital to her personally, were devastatingly more troubling to her facial calm than any most sickening picture in d’Annunzio’s portrayal of small-town humanity in which she was trying to take the proper, shocked interest.  Despite all her effort to remain tranquil she would guess by the stir of her pulses that probably she had lost control of herself again, and going to the mirror would catch her face all strained and tense in a breathless suspense.

But if there was one thing which life had taught her, it was persevering patience.  She drew from the enameled bonbonniere one of the curious, hard sweet-meats from Southern China; lifted to her face the spicy-sweet spikes of the swamp-orchid in her Venetian glass vase; turned her eyes on the reproduction of the Gauguin Ja Orana Maria, and began to draw long, rhythmic breaths, calling on all her senses to come to her rescue.  She let her arms and her head and her shoulders go limp again, and fixed her attention on rare and beautiful things of beauty . . . abandoning herself to the pictures called up by a volume of translated Japanese poems she had recently read . . . temples in groves . . . bells in the mist . . . rain on willow-trees . . . snow falling without wind. . . .  How delicate and suggestive those poems were!  How much finer, more subtle than anything in the Aryan languages!

She came to herself cautiously, glanced at her face in the mirror, and reached for the carved ivory pot of massage cream.

* * * * *

She decided then she would sew a little, instead of reading.  The frill of lace in her net dress needed to be changed . . . such a bore having to leave your maid behind.  She moved to the small, black-lacquered table where her work-box stood and leaned on it for a moment, watching the dim reflection of her pointed white fingers in the glistening surface of the wood.  They did not look like Marise’s brown, uncared-for hands.  She opened the inlaid box and took from it the thimble which she had bought in Siena, the little antique masterpiece of North Italian gold-work.  What a fulfilment of oneself it was to make life beautiful by beautifying all its implements.  What a revelation it might be to Neale, how a woman could make everything she touched exquisite, to Neale who had only known Marise, subdued helplessly to the roughness of the rough things about her, Marise who had capitulated to America and surrendered to the ugliness of American life.