Her blonde head fell heavily back upon the cushions and the light, streaming directly upon her face, revealed to his startled eyes all the intenser angularities produced by the last twelve months--angularities which seemed, somehow, to belong less to the features themselves than to the restless intelligence which lay behind them.

Connie's features had always appeared too small for expression; too correctly formed for any deviating individuality, but the impression made upon Adams now was that they had grown so thin--so transparent in their fineness--that he looked through them to the nervous animation confined and struggling in her fragile body.

The same animation throbbed like a pulse in her emaciated bosom, which only the extreme smallness of her bones kept still lovely in its low-cut evening gown.

She was devoured, consumed by the agony of restlessness which shook through her, directing and controlling her slender judgment like a perpetual and imperfectly subdued convulsion of passion.
For an instant he looked at her in attentive silence, then, as her fingers wrestled uncertainly with the cords of her evening wrap, he rose from his chair and bent forward to assist her.
"It's in a hard knot," she said irritably.

"I can't undo it." While he released the fastening and drew back his glance fell upon the little bluish hollows in her temples, over which the light curls were skilfully arranged, and as he realised fully her wasted physical resources, it seemed to him that an allusion to anything so sordid as a mere financial difficulty would sound not only trivial but positively indecorous as well.