e too
perfect beauty."

As she curled up the corners of her mouth in an affected smirk, he
quickly shifted his glance, with a horrible suspicion that she was
crossing her eyes. As she had pronounced the word perfect
"_parfect_," he presumed that she was making herself look, for the
remainder, like Antonia. It was her latest vaudeville turn, imitating
Antonia. He was careful not to look again in her direction until she had
stopped doing what annoyed him furiously. He could not hope to make her
understand to what point the debasing of beauty to brutal comic uses
wounded him.

"Faultless features," he went on after a time, in commentary on his
earlier remark, "do not by any means always make a beautiful face,"
politely leading her to suppose he meant that to be without them was no
great misfortune.

Estelle came into the room for company. She brought her sewing, one of
those elegant pieces of handiwork that give to idleness a good
conscience. Gerald felt her delicately try to get acquainted with him.
She was not as altogether void of intellectual curiosity as her friend.
She would seem to care about discovering further what sort of man he was
mentally, what his ideas were on a variety of subjects. Also, but even
more delicately, to interest him, just a little bit, in her own self and
ideas.

He was grateful to her, and did what he could to show himself
responsive. With the portrait began the period of a less perfunctory
relation between them. They had talks sometimes that Aurora declared,
without trace of envy, were 'way above her head.

Estelle was waking to an interest in the art and history of the Old
World. She was "reading up" on these things. She was also "working at"
her French, and would in a little systematic way she had excuse herself
at the same hour daily, saying she must go and get her lessons. Not
feeling quite the enterprise to study two languages at one time, she had
given the preference to French, as being the more generally useful in
Europe.

Gerald now made the acquaintance of a new member of the household. She
came into the room bearing a small tray with a hot-water pot and a cup.
She took this to Aurora, who helped herself to plain hot water,
explaining:

"I am trying to 'redooce.' This is good for what ails me, they say. But
I could never in the world think of it. Clotilde thinks of it for me,
and she's that punctual! Clotilde, you're too punctual with this stuff.
You don't suppose I like i