"How can you be so sure?"
That was something that it was better not to tell, so Lydia went away laughing, leaving Miss Bennett to wonder, as she always did after one of these interviews, how it was possible to feel so superior to Lydia when they were apart and so ineffectual when they were together. She always came to the same conclusion—that she was betrayed by her own fineness; that she was more aware of shades, of traditions than this little daughter of a workingman. Lydia was not little. She was half a foot taller than Adeline Bennett's own modest five-feet-two, but the adjective expressed a latent wish. Miss Bennett often introduced it into her descriptions. A nice little man, a clever little woman, a dear little person were some of her favorite tags. They made her bulk larger in her own vision.
The little daughter of the workingman ran upstairs for her hat. She found her maid, Evans, engaged in polishing her jewels. The rite of polishing Miss Thorne's jewels took place in the bathroom, which was also a dressing room, containing long mirrors, a dressing table, cupboards with glass doors through which Miss Thorne's bright hats and beribboned underclothes showed faintly. It was carpeted and curtained and larger than many a hall bedroom.
Here Evans, a pale, wistful English girl, was spreading out the jewelry as she finished each piece, laying them on a white towel where the rays of the afternoon sun fell upon them—the cabochon ruby like a dome of frozen blood, the flat, clear diamond as blue as ice, and the band of emeralds and diamonds for her hair flashing rays of green and orange lights. Lydia liked her jewelry for the best of all reasons—she had bought most of it herself. She particularly liked the emerald band, which made her look like an Eastern princess in a Russian ballet, and in her opinion exactly fitted her type. But her beauty was not so easily classified as she thought. To describe her in words was to describe a picture by Cabanel of The Star of the Harem—such a picture as the galleries of the second half of the nineteenth century were sure to contain—the oval face, the splendid dark eyes, the fine black eyebrows, the raven hair; but Lydia's skin was not transparently white, and a slight heightening of her cheek bones and a thrust forward of her jaw suggested something more Indian than Eastern, something that made her seem more at home on a mountain trail than on the edge of a marble pool.
As she entered, Evans was brushing the last traces of powder from a little diamond bracelet less modern than the other pieces. Lydia took it in her hand.
"I almost forgot I had that," she said.
Three or four years before, when she had first known Bobby Dorset, when they had been very young, he had given it to her. It had been his mother's, and she had worn it constantly for a year or so. An impulse of tenderness made her slip it on her arm now, and as it clung there like a living pressure the heavy feeling of it faintly revived a whole cycle of old emotions. She thought to herself that she had some human affections after all.
"It ought to be reset, miss," said Evans. "The gold spoils the diamonds."
"You do keep my things beautifully, Evans."
The girl colored at the praise, not often given by her rapidly moving young mistress, and the muscles twitched in her throat.