contributed their three inches to her stature, the long lines of the
flowing robe added their dignity, and the strands of her hair, each
woven carefully into its appointed place, completed the transformation
from the touseled, hoydenish boy-girl of half an hour before into the
luxurious and somewhat bored young lady of fashion.

But she sank into the chair before her breakfast tray and ate with an
appetite which took something form this illusion, while Titine brought
her letters and a long box of flowers which were unwrapped and placed
in a floor-vase of silver and glass in an embrasure of the window.
The envelope which accompanied the flowers Titine handed to her
mistress, who opened it carelessly between mouthfuls and finally added
it to the accumulated litter of fashionable stationery. Hermia eyed
her Dresden chocolate-pot uncheerfully. This breakfast gift had
reached her with an ominous regularity on Mondays and Thursdays for a
month, and the time had come when something must be done about it.
But she did not permit unpleasant thoughts, if unpleasant they really
were, to distract her from the casual delights of retrospection and
the pleasures of her repast, which she finished with a thoroughness
that spoke more eloquently of the wholesomeness of her appetite even
than the real excellence of the cooking. Upon Titine, who brought her
the cigarettes and a brazier, she created the impression--as she
always did indoors--of a child, greatly overgrown, parading herself
with mocking ostentation in the garments of maturity. The cigarette,
too, was a part of this parade, and she smoked it daintily, though
without apparent enjoyment.

Her meal finished, she was ready to receive feminine visitors. She
seldom lacked company, for it is not the fate of a girl of Hermia
Challoner's condition to be left long to her own devices. Her