Part Two - Massage Cream; Theme and Variations

July 20.

The hardest thing for Eugenia about these terribly hard days of suspense
was to keep her self-control in her own room. Of course for her as for
any civilized being, it was always possible to keep herself in hand with
people looking on. But for years she had not had to struggle so when
alone, for poise and self-mastery. Her room at the Crittendens', which
had been hers so long, and which Marise had let her furnish with her own
things, was no longer the haven of refuge it had been from the bitter,
raw crudity of the Vermont life. She tried to fill the empty hours of
Neale's daily absences from the house with some of the fastidious,
delicate occupations of which she had so many, but they seemed brittle
in her hot hands, and broke when she tried to lean on them. A dozen
times a day she interrupted herself to glance with apprehension at her
reflection in the mirror, the Florentine mirror with the frame of brown
wood carved, with the light, restrained touch of a good period, into
those tasteful slender columns. And every time she looked, she was
horrified and alarmed to see deep lines of thought, of hope, of
impatience, of emotion, criss-crossing fatally on her face.

Then she would sit down before her curving dressing-table, gather the
folds of her Persian room-dress about her, lift up her soul and go
through those mental and physical relaxing exercises which the wonderful
lecturer of last winter had explained. She let her head and shoulders
and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind
the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the crass rigidity of a
growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and
summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things;
the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human
note of their tilted corners; Arabian traceries; cunningly wrought,
depraved wood-carvings in the corners of Gothic cathedrals; the gay and
amusing pink rotundities of a Boucher ceiling. When she felt her face
calm and unlined again, she put on a little massage cream, to make
doubly sure, and rubbed it along where the lines of emotion had been.