“Adieu, Betsy! good-night, Henk! I am going to lie down, I am tired out!” said Eline in one breath, while still in the hall.
“Won’t you take a snack of supper first?” asked Betsy.
“No, thank you.”
She walked up-stairs, while Betsy shrugged her shoulders. Betsy knew her and her ways, and from the curt, determined words she guessed that Eline was in one of those moods of nervous excitability in which she almost hated any one who attempted to dissuade her from her intentions.
“What is the matter with Eline?” asked Henk anxiously, when they had entered the dining-room. [[129]]
“Oh, how should I know?” cried Betsy. “It commenced at the concert, and in the carriage she did not even answer me, as you must have noticed. I don’t trouble about it, but I think Eline intolerable when she has those ridiculous fits.”
Calm and dignified, in her swan’s-down and plush, Eline walked up-stairs and entered her sitting-room. The gas was alight, and a log of wood burnt on the hearth. For a moment she looked round, then tore the white lace from her hair, and the little cloak from her shoulders, and with bowed head and staring eyes gazed in front of her with a vacant expression, as though crushed under the weight of a terrible disappointment.
In the little Venetian mirror, gracefully suspended with red cords and tassels, above the white group of Amor and Psyche, whose idyllic appearance was in mocking contrast with the irony of her thoughts, she saw herself reflected, glistening in “her pink rep silk,” a pink aigrette in her hair, the same in which, three months ago, she had first seen Fabrice.
And now—
She almost laughed aloud, she thought herself so ridiculous, she felt a loathing for herself, as if she had been dabbling in the mire.