! What is the matter with me?"

Under these auspices she forced her voice again, and subsequently
loosened her dress, complaining of the dressmaker's affection for
tightness. "Now," she said, having fallen upon an attempt at simple "do,
re, me, fa," and laughed at herself. Was it the laugh, that stopping
her at "si," made that "si" so husky, asthmatic, like the wheezing of a
crooked old witch? "I am unlucky, to-night," said Emilia. Or, rather,
so said her surface-self. The submerged self--self in the depths--rarely
speaks to the occasions, but lies under calamity quietly apprehending
all; willing that the talker overhead should deceive others, and herself
likewise, if possible. Emilia found her hands acting daintily and
critically in the attirement of her person; and then surprised herself
murmuring: "I forgot that Tracy won't be here to-night." By which she
betrayed that she had divined those arts she was to shine in, according
to Tracy; and betrayed that she had a terrible fear of a loss of all
else. It pained her now that Tracy should not be coming. "Can I send
for him?" she thought, as she looked winningly into the glass, trying to
feel what sort of a feeling it was to be in love with a face like
that one fronting her, so familiar in its aspects, so strange when
scrutinized studiously! She drew a chair, and laying her elbow on the
toilet-table, gazed hard, until the thought: "What face did Wilfrid see
last?" (meaning, "when he saw me last") drove her away.

Not only did she know herself now a face of many faces; but the
life within her likewise as a soul of many souls. The one Emilia, so
unquestioning, so sure, lay dead; and a dozen new spirits, with but
a dim likeness to her, were fighting for possession of her frame, now
occupying it alone, now in couples; and each casting grim reflections on
the other. Which is only a way of telling you that the great result of
mortal suffering--consciousness--had fully set in; to ripen; perhaps to
debase; at any rate, to prove her.

To be of worth was still her fixed idea--all that was clear in the
thickening mist. "I cannot be ugly," she said, and reproved herself for
simulating a childish tone. "Why do I talk in that way? I know I am not
ugly. But if a fire scorched my face? There is nothing that seems safe!"
The love of friends was suggested to her as something to rely on; and
the loving them. "But if I have nothing to give!" said Emilia, and
opened both her empty hands. Sh