This went on for an intolerable time. Extracts from poor Denis’s letters were read aloud, as if for purposes of comparison with the real Emily, and from time to time Mrs. Lanier asked very direct questions about her parents, her education, her financial position. In the end, Emily had an excellent picture of herself as she appeared to Denis’s mother—a silly, awkward girl, without money or position, who had somehow cajoled a fine young man to his destruction.
She made no attempt to defend herself. She had no great talent for that. She was a sensitive, impulsive creature, quite lacking in self-satisfaction. Moreover, she was very young and inexperienced, and perhaps a little too willing to learn.
She began to think that she really was the contemptible creature that Mrs. Lanier believed her to be. A sense of guilt oppressed her. She sat before her imperturbable judge, pale and downcast, answering the older woman’s questions in a low, unsteady voice.
Presently Mrs. Lanier had an ally in her daughter Cynthia, a cool, casual blond girl, who looked as if she could be beautiful if she liked, but didn’t think it worth trying. Cynthia didn’t ask questions. That, too, she seemed to think not worth trying. She simply began conversations which died at once, because Emily could take no share in them.
There was really no malice in Cynthia—only a measureless indifference to other people and their unimportant feelings. When she discovered that Emily had never set foot in Paris, had never been to the opera or to a race, and bought her clothes in department stores, she saw that poor Denis’s wife was hopeless, and simply stopped talking.
By this time Emily quite agreed with her. The window was open, and Mrs. Lanier had asked her daughter to shut off “that horrible heat.” In a temperature that caused Emily to shiver in misery, those two superior creatures sat in calm comfort.
Very well—if they could endure the cold, in their low-cut frocks, then Emily, in a cloth dress, could also endure it, and would. She would endure their little stinging, icy words, too—every one of them.
In desperation she made an effort to imitate Cynthia’s cool and casual air. A pitiable failure! There was precious little coolness in her strained smile, her faltering words. The last trace of poise had slipped from her. She no longer tried to hold her own, but simply to endure.
“They’ll tell Denis,” she thought, over and over again. “Nothing could really make him change toward me; but oh, this will hurt him so! If only they had waited! Oh, if only they had waited until—until I was a little older and—and had more poise!”
A waiter came in to lay the table, and Mrs. Lanier ordered a dinner of all the things that Emily most heartily disliked—such a cold, flat sort of dinner!