"Yes. That's very awkward," said Barbara dispassionately. "Especially when it's so straight."
Alex reflected that her sister was just as self-contained as ever.
"Wouldn't you like to come to your room and rest till dinner, Alex?"
Alex got up at once.
"You ought to take Plasmon, or something of that sort, and try to get a little fatter. There's simply nothing of you, Alex—you're all eyes, with rings like saucers round them."
After Barbara had left her in the tiny, pretty bedroom, that Alex thought looked wonderfully luxurious, she went straight to her looking-glass.
"Good heavens, how ugly I am!" she said to herself involuntarily.
Her face was sallow, with sunken cheeks, and the Roman sun had powdered her skin all over with little, pale freckles. Her eyes, as Barbara had said, had rings like saucers round them, and looked oddly large and prominent, from the slight puffiness of the under-lids.
Her teeth had, perhaps, suffered most of all. She had had one or two taken out, and the gaps were visible and unsightly. They had never been very good teeth, and she remembered still all that she had suffered at the hands of an unskilled Brussels dentist in Belgium. For the last few years she had endured intermittent toothache, sooner than submit to further torture, and she saw now that a small black patch was spreading between the two front teeth. Barbara, with the grey mingled freely in her light hair, and her severe widow's weeds, might look more than twenty-eight but Alex, at thirty-one, bore the semblance of a woman of forty.
She hid her face in her disfigured hands.