“A little—only just a little, dear,” deprecatingly.
Then strangely enough fell upon them a silence. Dolly turned toward the window, and her eyes seemed to fix themselves upon some far-away point, as if she was pondering over a new train of thought. And when at last she spoke, her voice was touched with the tremulous unsteadiness of tears.
“Do you think,” she said, slowly,—"do you think that any one who had loved me would be shocked to see me now? Am I so much altered as that? One scarcely sees these things one's self,—they come to pass so gradually.”
All poor Phemie's smiles died away.
“Don't let us talk about it,” she pleaded. “I cannot bear to hear you speak so. Don't, dear—if you please, don't!”
Her pain was so evident that it roused Dolly at once.
“I won't, if it troubles you,” she said, almost in her natural manner. “It does not matter,—why should it? There is no one here to be shocked. I was only wondering.”
But the shadow did not quite leave her face, and even when, an hour later, Euphemia bade her good-by and left her, promising to return again as soon as possible, it was there still.
She was very, very quiet for a few minutes after she found herself alone. She clasped her hands behind her head, and lay back in the light chair, looking out of the window. She was thinking so deeply that she did not even stir for a while; but in the end she got up, as though moved by some impulse, and crossed the room.
Against the wall hung a long, narrow mirror, and she went to this mirror and stood before it, looking at herself from head to foot,—at her piteously sharpened face, with its large, wondering eyes, eyes that wondered at themselves,—at the small, light figure so painfully etherealized, and about which the white wrapper hung so loosely. She even held up, at last, the slender hand and arm; but when she saw these uplifted, appealing, as it were, for this sad, new face which did not seem her own, she broke into a little cry of pain and grief.