Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the purpose of the juggler’s chatter while he shifts the contents of his sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette-smoke she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.
“Your hair’s wonderful, Lily. Thinner—? What does that matter, when it’s so light and alive? So many women’s worries seem to go straight to their hair—but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Mattie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you—why don’t you let him?”
Miss Bart’s immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said, with a slight touch of irritation: “I don’t care to accept a portrait from Paul Morpeth.”
Mrs. Fisher mused. “N—no. And just now, especially—well, he can do you after you’re married.” She waited a moment, and then went on: “By the way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day. She turned up here last Sunday—and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!”
She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart’s lifted hand maintained its unwavering stroke from brow to nape.
“I never was more astonished,” Mrs. Fisher pursued. “I don’t know two women less predestined to intimacy—from Bertha’s standpoint, that is; for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be singled out—I’ve no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda. Well, you know I’ve always told you that Mattie secretly longed to bore herself with the really fashionable; and now that the chance has come, I see that she’s capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it.”
Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her friend. “Including ME?” she suggested.
“Ah, my dear,” murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the hearth.
“That’s what Bertha means, isn’t it?” Miss Bart went on steadily. “For of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie.”
Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. “She has her fast now, at any rate. To think of that loud independence of Mattie’s being only a subtler form of snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe anything she pleases—and I’m afraid she’s begun, my poor child, by insinuating horrors about you.”