“Where is she now?”
“Resting,” replied Victorine, “in the boudoir.”
(That terrible room with the bearskin rugs and the mirrors sending back and forth innumerable reflections, as if the place were filled with a host of people ... a host of personalities all of whom were in the end contained within the flesh of the on-looker.... Many persons in each of us, thought Sabine. It was comic to think of Ellen Tolliver, so distinguished, so self-possessed, so cold, in the midst of all that cheap demi-mondaine splendor.)
“Are my things ready?”
“I was not sure, Madame, how many things you wished to take away with you. I got ready the things I knew. There may be others.”
Sabine made her decision. “I will come in and get them now. Say nothing to Madame Callendar. If she’s resting, I’ll hurry away without her knowing that I’ve come.”
She slipped a ten franc note into the insinuating palm of Victorine who promptly said, “It’s good to see you again, Madame,” in a voice which carried another meaning—“We would much prefer you to the new Mrs. Callendar.”
Sabine ignored her. “And Monsieur Callendar?” she asked again.
“He did not return, Madame. Nothing was said of him.”
In the boudoir everhead Ellen lay, with her black dog by her side, staring resentfully at the reflections. She was unable to rest. Lying on the Egyptian chaise longue she surveyed the room and decided that she would have the indecent mirrors taken down to-morrow. She was certain that Sabine was not responsible for them; she suspected, out of the knowledge that had come to her in the past six months, that they were perhaps an idea of Callendar. They were unhealthy, she thought; all the house, for that matter, was unhealthy, even the hall and the glimpse of the darkened drawing room she had been able to snatch on her way up the marble stairs with the red plush rail. It was unhealthy to be stared at, accused day in and day out by these innumerable stupid reflections. It was, truly, an amazing house, and so like Thérèse. Why, she wondered, had Sabine not changed it? Sabine, with her faultless taste, her reserve, her ironic shell, must have hated it, always. Perhaps ... perhaps she had not dared to oppose him. Perhaps he too, like his mother, had been fond of the house. Perhaps he had looked at Sabine (smiling with his mouth but not his eyes) and said, “We will let it rest for the present. Some day ...” and so slipped away in that inexplicable, unconquerable fashion he had revealed in the villa at Tunis. Perhaps.... She began to understand a little of what Sabine’s life had been. Out of her own short, vivid experience, she was able to reconstruct bits of it, here and there. And Sabine had endured it for more than twelve years....