Sidonia stood, clasping and unclasping her hands. Every word her aunt spoke, dropped apparently with such heedlessness, but in reality with such subtle intent, stabbed her to her sore heart.
"Approach, my dear," said Betty, maternally, "and let me, for heaven's sake, run a comb through your hair. Mercy on us, child, what a gown! Had you not better change it?"
"No," said Sidonia, sullenly. She went, on leaden foot, to her aunt's toilet table and gave an unseeing touch to her hair.
Betty looked over her shoulder; the two faces were reflected side by side. Sidonia's reflection in the glass looked positively ugly—in her own eyes. In Betty's, too, apparently, for she cried, with an air of great generosity and wisdom:
"I would offer to go with you, to support you, my angel; but after what has passed—I think it were wiser he should not see me. After all, who knows? You may patch it up. But, Sidonia, you really ought to make yourself a little tidy."
Madame Athenaïs, who, if she had that ignorance of the German language attributed to her ultra-Parisian nature, had contrived nevertheless to follow the dialogue pretty closely, here interposed with the unctuous familiarity of her kind:
"Oh, if the young lady is going to have an interview of importance, it is certain she should make some toilet. See, if mademoiselle permits, I will show her a hat that is the very thing for the occasion. Something young, young, quite virginal, yet, coquet, alluring!—something no gentleman of taste could resist on mademoiselle's head!"
Sidonia—she was but seventeen, after all—stamped her foot.
"Leave me in peace, all of you!" she cried, and made for the door.
The keenest of all Betty's stabs she carried away in her heart; that was the vision of Betty herself, so fair, so distracting in her plumed hat, beside Sidonia, plain, awkward, ill-dressed—poor Sidonia whom Steven had married ... without love! Betty's words: "It were wiser he should not see me," sang in her ears to the fierce accompaniment of her own jealous blood. She recalled the smile and the glance at her own reflection in the mirror, with which Betty had pointed her concession to wisdom. Hot-tempered by nature, Sidonia had yet never even suspected the existence of such passion as now rent her.