"I told her it did." Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been able to see the middle of her back.
"But it doesn't show, does it ?" she asked.
"It perfectly well might." Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair.

In her short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have been a child.
The silence began to grow awkward.

Mathilde put on her dressing-gown; it was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white column.

A glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her.

She pushed a chair near her fire for her mother, and herself remained standing, with her glass of milk in her hand.
"Mama," she said suddenly, "I suppose I'm what you'd call engaged." "O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day ?" "Why not to him ?" "I know nothing about him." "I don't know very much myself.