She sat down, accepted a glass of champagne; cordial greetings passed between Lot and his sister. Ottilie was a couple of years older than Lot; she was Mamma's eldest child and resembled both her father, Pauws, and Mamma, for she was tall, with her father's masterful ways, but had Mamma's features, her clear profile and delicate chin, though not her eyes. But her many years of public appearances had given her movements a graceful assurance, that of a talented and beautiful woman, accustomed to being looked at and applauded, something quite different from any sort of ordinary, domestic attractiveness: the harmonious, almost sculptural gestures, after being somewhat studied at first, had in course of time become natural....
"What a good-looking woman!" thought Elly; and she felt herself to be nobody, small, insignificant, in the simple wrap which she had put on hurriedly after her bath.
Ottilie, who was forty-one, looked no more than thirty and had the youthfulness of an artist who keeps her body young by means of an art and science of beauty unknown to the ordinary woman. A white-cloth gown, which avoided the last extravagances of fashion, gave her figure the perfection of a statue and revealed the natural outlines of arms and bosom beneath the modern dress. The great black hat circled its black ostrich-feather around her copper-glowing fair hair, which was plaited in a heavy coil; a wide grey boa hung in a light cloud of ostrich-feathers around her; and, in those colourless tints—white, black and grey—she remained, notwithstanding her almost too great beauty, attractive at once as a well-bred woman and an artist.
"Well, that's my sister, Elly!" said Lot, proudly. "What do you think of her?"
"I've seen you before, Elly, at the Hague," said Ottilie.
"I don't remember, Ottilie."
"No, you were a little girl of eight, or nine perhaps; and you had a big playroom at Grandpapa Takma's and a lovely doll's-house...."
"So I did."
"I haven't been to the Hague since."
"You went to the Conservatoire at Liège?"