After the fourth treatment she was to begin and see a difference. How anxiously she scanned herself in the glass. Nothing. And her body felt exactly as her face looked,—amazingly weary.
‘It takes longer with some people,’ said the nurse, when Catherine commented on this on her fifth visit. ‘There was one lady came here who noticed nothing at all till just before the end, and then you should have seen her. Why, she skipped out of that door. And sixty, if a day.’
‘Perhaps I’m not old enough,’ said Catherine. ‘All the people you tell me about are sixty or seventy.’
She was sitting on the sofa of the Rose du Barri boudoir being dressed. She was too tired to stand up. Those crackles, going on for half an hour, were a great strain on her endurance. They didn’t hurt enough to make her cry out, but enough to make her need all her determination not to.
The nurse laughed. ‘Well, we are depressed to-day, aren’t we,’ she said brightly. ‘People do get like that about half-way through—the slow ones, I mean, who don’t react at once as some do. You’ll see. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’
The next time she came the nurse flung up both hands on seeing her. ‘Why, aren’t you looking well this morning!’ she cried.
Catherine hurried to the glass. ‘Am I?’ she said, staring at herself.
‘Such a change,’ said the nurse with every sign of pleasure. ‘I was sure it would begin soon. Now you’ll see it going on more and more quickly every day.’
‘Shall I?’ said Catherine, scrutinising the face in the glass.
For the life of her she could see no difference. She said so. The nurse laughed at her.