She had a sense of acquiescing in this plan with the passiveness of a sufferer resigned to the surgeon's touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic helplessness continued when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs.
Fisher followed her upstairs.
"May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire?
If we talk in my room we shall disturb the child." Mrs.Fisher looked about her with the eye of the solicitous hostess.

"I hope you've managed to make yourself comfortable, dear?
Isn't it a jolly little house?
It's such a blessing to have a few quiet weeks with the baby." Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and money enough, she would not end by devoting them both to her daughter.
"It's a well-earned rest: I'll say that for myself," she continued, sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire.
"Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to wish myself back with the Gormers.

Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious--it's nothing to social ambition! Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called on us called on ME because I was with her, or on HER because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to find out what I thought.

Of course I had to disown my oldest friends, rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single acquaintance--when, all the while, that was what she had me there for, and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!" Mrs.Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the purpose of the juggler's chatter while he shifts the contents of his sleeves.

Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet-table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.
"Your hair's wonderful, Lily.