"Like it?" he said, smiling back at her with something impersonal in his eyes that deadened her. "All this formality is hardly my choice; it's Pauline's idea."
They were met by Pauline—known to Zoe and her mother through perfunctory office meetings. She was exceedingly petite, rather appealingly so in her widowhood, and of her younger brother's rather Spanish darkness, except for a graying coiffure worn high and flatteringly.
There were seventeen years between them and yet her shoulders were deeply white, and rose, quite unwithered, out of a jetted evening gown; and her profile, also with the heat lightning of a scarcely perceptible nervous quiver to it, entirely without the sag of tired flesh.
A certain petulance lent to her exceedingly well-bred diction quite a charm, and she was playful and adoring enough to pinch each cheek of her brother's as she tiptoed to kiss him.
"Nice boy to bring home charming people and save me from the boredom of dining alone. How's my handsome brother? Naughty boy! It's the first time you've looked yourself in weeks. They work him too hard down there, Mrs. Penny. I tell my fat brother he's become little more than an ornamental gargoyle. It's too sordid for this boy, and now you running away from him just when I had hoped the time was ripe for him to dabble in some of the things he's set his heart on. The kind of plays he reads all night until I have to turn his lights out. Shame on you for running away!"
Her twitter, from topical bough to topical bough, hardly demanded reply. She exclaimed over Zoe, admiring her extravagantly, insisted upon kissing away a purely imaginary look of headache from her brother's brow, and led the way quite tinily regal, her running line of comment unbroken.
In a soft boudoir of French grays, French doors, cerulean blues, and a litter of every extravagant requisite of the toilet, Lilly faced herself in a cunningly triplicated mirror.
"We're not dressed. We shouldn't have come," trying to ride down her sense of misery.
"I'm dressed in all the cloth of gold you have woven for me," quoth Zoe, in mock grandiloquence, still pitched to her exultant key and in all her youthful capacity for it, full of self.
There were enamel-backed brushes with deep bristles that plowed her hair out into dust of gold, and a finely wrought amber comb which she ran through the fluff, striking an attitude.