Laura had resumed her work in front of the mirror. As the delicate task advanced towards the finishing touch with the powder puff and the choice of perfumes and jewels, her serious expression grew in solemnity.
Her movements became more deliberate like those of an officiating priest. All these pastes, creams, essences and perfumes were sacrifices and incense in a secret cult. The dressing table was the altar and the image in the mirror was the god. And just as a worshipper at the altar ponders over the past and questions the future, so it was at her dressing table that Laura became absorbed in recollections and sought inspiration for her future plans. Her face thus participated very intimately in all she did. When she thought of herself it was quite naturally of her hair, her mouth, her eyes, that she thought. Her egoism flourished under the spell of the mirrored image. The shadow and the reality merged imperceptibly together. She was sitting at the high altar of feminine selfishness.
Then Stellan arrived, dressed in a dinner jacket. He stepped without ceremony into the holiest of holies, patted Laura approvingly on the neck, and threw himself down in an empty chair beside the dressing table. You could scarcely have seen that he was over thirty and that his life during the last years had been rather stormy. His face still bore an expression of self-satisfied, smiling irony. Only the corners of his mouth had set, not into earnestness, but into hardness.
Sister and brother had not met during the whole summer. Laura tore herself away from the mirror with an effort. She looked at her brother searchingly. It was as if she looked in vain for something in his face:
“And now you have become a balloon pilot, too,” she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. “How did you get that idea into your head?”
Stellan played with a small lady’s watch of about the size of a sixpence.
“Well, I did it in anger. I had to sell the Ace of Spades, and it got into the papers. So then I found a way of cutting out the cavalry. They look simply ludicrous down below on their horses.”
Laura did not answer Stellan’s smile:
“Do you know what I thought when I read about your folly?” she said. “Oh, are his affairs in such a rotten state?” I thought.
Stellan frowned: