"What is it?" whispered her friend.
"Oh, nothing," she afterward remembered saying. The servant was still close at her elbow. She turned her head toward him.
"Let her wait," she said. "Tell her that I will see her quite soon."
The whole affair had been very rapid of occurrence. No one present had given a sign of having observed it.
'If I had only not grown so pale,' she thought.
The paper was still clutched in her left hand, and she had thrust this half-way beneath the table-cover. With her right hand she began to make a play of eating something from the plate before her, as she addressed the lady on her other side. What she said must have been something very gracious and pleasant, for the lady smiled and answered affably, while the servants glided, the music sounded, the delightful feast progressed. Everything had grown dim and whirling to Claire. And yet she had already realized perfectly that Mrs. Lee was striking her blow. It had come, sudden, cruel, direct. Her blurred mind, her weakened and chilling body, did not leave that one fact any the less clear. She understood just what it was, why it was, and whence it was.
The note had been from her mother. It was half illiterate invective, half threatening rebuke. Its writer waited outside and demanded to see her. "If you don't come," the ill-shaped writing ran, "I will come to you." Claire knew that this thing had been Mrs. Lee's work as well as if a thousand witnesses had averred it. The missive contained no mention of Mrs. Lee, but she nevertheless had her certainty.
'I must go,' she told herself. 'I must go and meet her. Can I go? Can I walk, feeling as I do? Should I not fall if I tried?'
She always afterward remembered the food that her fork now touched and trifled with. It was a sweetbread croquette, with little black specks of chopped truffle in its creamy yielding oval, and the air that they were playing out in the hall was from a light, valueless opera, then much in vogue. She always afterward remembered that, too. So do slight events often press themselves in upon the dazed and dilated vision of a great distress.
'Can I rise and walk?' she kept thinking. 'Should I not fall if I tried?'