Ellen drooped her head so that she need not look at her as she sat down on the bed beside her with neither word nor gesture that said it was a movement towards intimacy, and said, “I hope you’re not very tired.”  When Ellen went into the bathroom she wept in her bath, because the words could not have been said more indifferently, and it was dreadful to suspect, as she had to later, that someone so like Richard was either affected or hypocritical.  For if that wildness were sincere, and not some Southern affectation (and she had always heard that the English were very affected), then the nice but ordinary things she said when she was doing up Ellen’s black taffeta frock must be all hypocrisy and condescension.

It was a pity that she was so very like Richard.  When they had gone downstairs and taken a table in that same glittering room behind the plate glass walls, Ellen forgot her uncomfortable feeling that as she crossed the room everyone had stared at her feet in a nasty sort of way in her resentful recognition of that likeness.  She was not, of course, so handsome as Richard, though she was certainly what people call “very striking-looking.”  Ellen felt pleased that the description should be at once so appropriate and so common.  She did not allow herself to translate it from commonness and admit that it is a phrase that common people use when they want to say a woman’s face is the point of departure for a fair journey of the imagination.  It was true that a certain rough imperfection was as definitely a part of her quality as perfection was of his, and that there ran from her nose to her mouth certain heavy lines that could never at any age befall his flesh with its bias towards beauty.  But everything that so wonderfully made its appearance a reference to romance was here also:  that dark skin in which it seemed as if the customary pigment had been blended with mystery; that extravagance of certain features, the largeness of the eye, the luxury of lashes; that manner at once languid and alert, which might have been acquired by residence in some country where molten excess of fine weather was corrected by gales of adventure.  But though so close in blood and in seeming to the most beloved, this woman could not be loved.  She could not possibly be liked.  But this was an irrational emotion, and Ellen hated such, and she watched her for signs of some quality that would justify it.

It was there.  Strong intimations of a passion for the trivial were brought forth by movement.  As she bent over the menu, and gave orders that trembled on the edge of audibility to a waiter whom she appeared not to see, she repeatedly raised her right hand and with a swift, automatic sweep of the forefinger, on which her pink nail flashed like a polished shell, she smoothed her thick eyebrows.  It was evidently a habitual gesture and used for something more than its apparent purpose, for when she had finished and leaned back in her chair she repeated it, although