Flushed and annoyed, I turned and walked around my room, seeking distraction. I picked up the hairbrush and began vaguely to take out my pins, then stopped abruptly, my eye stuck upon the blue cover of The Mill on the Floss. My eyes filled again, for the ghosts and the girls. I looked in the glass and started to find that I had half-undressed myself—my hair come loose from its Psyche knot and lying down about my shoulders, my dress opened at the neck and cuffs.

Leaning into this sight, I regarded the face there. Her thick hair was parted down the center and hung loosely on either side of her face before it was caught up at the nape of her neck, her pale skin shining out from amidst that luxuriant dark mass, giving the effect of a lit stage appearing from behind the parting curtains. Her dark brown eyes were round and bright, and they stared back with a hunger I recognized, looking directly at me, her hand holding her hair from her neck so the white length gleamed in the mirror. The shoulders a little high. The eyebrows a trifle thick. The soft lines of her chin and mouth below a cool eye, considering.

“And what do you want, my princess?” I whispered to the girl in the glass. But she broke into pieces at the sound of her own voice, and the image of beauty shivered into my flushed cheeks, my crystal earrings, the unbrushed hair curling and untidy around my face. The first dinner bell sounded below. “I renounce all of it,” I said aloud and portentously, though my hands still did their business, reaching for the buttons behind, pulling my tea gown from off my shoulders, and letting the gray silk slide from me, leaving it to pool around my boots on the floor. I stepped from it and turned to take up the dinner dress Jessie had readied. Again I regarded myself, my hands fastening and arranging, my eyes steady on my task. I pulled my hair up and off my forehead, sweeping it back with a dark green ribbon upon which I had sewn three tiny periwinkles last summer. The second bell sounded.