Marie was better.
She rose from her bed about six o'clock, pleased as a cat with the warm room, and set about the business of her toilet. Sitting down to the dressing-table, she looked long and earnestly at her face; the rest she had taken had plumped and coloured it again, but there was a something, a kind of frailty, a blue darkness under the eyes. Perhaps it made her look less pretty? She was inclined to fret over it a trifle. To counteract it she dressed her hair with a fluffy softness unusual to her trim style; she took immense pains over her finger-nails and put on her best high frock. She hurried over her preparations, having been reluctant to leave her bed till the last possible moment. Mrs. Amber had laid the dinner-table, but there were still things to do.
"Some day I shall keep an awf'ly good parlour-maid," Marie promised herself.
She went in to criticise and retouch her mother's painstaking arrangements. She grew flushed and irritated over the cooking.
"And a good cook," she added. "What dreams!"
Julia looked a good deal at Marie during dinner in the delusive light of the shaded candles, and at last she said:
"You're thinner. And there's something about you—I don't know what it is. You are almost fragile."
"I manage this flat entirely without help, you know," said Marie, looking round the speckless dining-room proudly.
"That ought not to do it," replied Julia, dismissing domestic work with a contemptuous wave of the hand. "Are you worrying?"
"Worrying?" Marie repeated. "What about?"