—I might have died without beginning! You, lies, saved me. What does that mean?
She lay back in her chair and the mirror fell to her lap.—I have lost so much hair ... black, lovely ... don’t think of that, that is not thinking! All you must fall as the hair fell. Fanny’s eyes closed. She slept.
She came to waking with her head forward and her hand upheld, watching her face in the glass. Clara was in the door.
—Did my looking at her asleep ... how she has grown old!... make her raise the glass like that to her shut eyes? Then they opened. Clara was afraid of the displacement her thoughts might make: she moved in her room and sent out words in it as if the air were tight with some subtle, feeling substance easily overflowed.
“How are you, dearie?... Been sleeping?”
She laid a bunch of violets in Fanny’s lap.
Fanny smiled, her eyes and her hands clasping the flowers thanked her.
“I’m so much better. Where have you been?”
“Just shopping.”