Past, who
rang up hotel bars and ordered the best cocktails sent up at once....

Possibly the cocktail had this moral reaction, that she no longer
sought to discipline her mind. She sipped the drink gingerly, and her
thought fluttered backward and forward, full of contradictions and
repetitions, as thought is in life, but now free.... Suppose, after all,
that her past was not escaped? It wasn't such an easy thing to do, it
seemed. Dalhousie thought he had escaped his, but it had run him down at
last, way off in Texas. Suppose Dr. Vivian now decided (in view of her
being a fugitive) that it was his duty to lay the matter before Colonel
Dalhousie, and the tempestuous Colonel took the next train....

There was a knock at the door, causing her to start violently, and spill
some of the cocktail. However, it was not Colonel Dalhousie, but only
the maid Flora, who entered with that air of eager hurry so
characteristic of an habitually tardy race. It appeared that the
infernal powers had conspired against her promptitude in the shape of a
blockade, not to mention losting her way through the malicious
misdirection of a white man selling little men that danced on a
string....

Having learned further that the postal uncle was poly las' month but
tollable now, Flora's young mistress said:

"We must dress in a hurry now, Flora. It's quarter to seven."

And then she went on through to the sitting-room of the suite, to wake
her mother, thinking: "I can't go on this way the rest of my life,
jumping out of my skin every time there's a knock.... What on earth have
I been so afraid of?..."

Mrs. Heth slept on in her deep-bosomed chair, undisturbed by the click
of switch or burst of light into her enveloping dusk. She had a
magazine, face downward, in her lap; also a one-pound box of mixed
chocolates, open. Her head had fallen upon her chair-back; a position
which brought the strange dark little mustache into prominence, and also
threw into relief the unexpected heaviness of the jaw and neck. The face
of an indomitable creature, certainly, of one of those fittest to
survive; but not exactly a spiritual face, perhaps, hardly a face finely
sensitive to immaterial values....

To gaze at a person who is unaware of being watched may be worse than
eavesdropping. Arrested in the act of waking her mother, Carlisle stood
for some moments looking down at her. What was there lacking in mamma
that you couldn't ever talk things over with her?