And Laura remained unconscious. She took her presently up-stairs to her room, Owen's room. It was all they had, she said. Nina held her head very straight, trying hard not to see Owen's coat that hung behind the door, or his big boots all in a row beside Laura's little ones. Her face in the glass met her with a challenge to her ironic humour. It demanded why she could not face that innocent juxtaposition, after all she had stood, after all that they were evidently prepared to make her stand. But she was not to be moved by any suggestions of her face. She owed it a grudge; it showed so visibly her murkiness. Sun-burnt, coarsened a little by the wind, with the short, virile, jutting bridge of the nose, the hot eyes, the mouth's ironic twist, it was the face not of a woman but a man, or rather of a temperament, a face foredoomed to disaster. She accentuated its effect by the masculine fashion of her clothes and the way she swept back her hair sidelong from her forehead. Laura saw her doing it now.
"I like your face," was her comment.
"It's more than I do," said Nina. "But I like my hands."
She began washing them with energy, as if thus dismissing an unpleasant subject. She could admire their fine flexible play under the water; do what she would with them her hands at least were feminine. But they brought her up sharp with the sight of the little scar, white on her wrist, reminding her of Owen. She was aware of the beast in her blood that crouched, ready to fall upon the innocent Laura.
At the other end of the room, by the wardrobe, Laura, in her innocence, was babbling about Owen.
"He's growing frightfully extravagant," she said. "He got fifteen pounds for an article the other day, and what do you think he did with it? Look there!"
She had taken a gown, a little mouse-coloured velvet gown, from the wardrobe and laid it on the bed for Nina to admire.
"He went and spent it, every bit of it, on that. He said he thought I should look nice in it. Wasn't it clever of him to know? And who ever would have thought that he'd have cared?"
Nina looked at the gown and remembered the years when Laura had gone shabby.
"He cares so much," said Laura, "that I have to put it on every evening."