"Minutely. I look at all your friends with great anxiety, knowing no
animal more dangerous than a fool. Vivian--a skinny woman, with a pretty
face, lovely hair, good teeth, dying eyes"--

"Yes, lovely!"

"A sure proof of a disordered stomach--and a waist pinched in so
unnaturally, that I said to myself, 'Where on earth does this idiot put
her liver?' Did you ever read of the frog who burst, trying to swell to
an ox? Well, here is the rivalry reversed; Mrs. Vivian is a bag of bones
in a balloon; she can machine herself into a wasp; but a fine young
woman like you, with flesh and muscle, must kill yourself three or four
times before you can make your body as meagre, hideous, angular, and
unnatural as Vivian's. But all you ladies are mono-maniacs; one might as
well talk sense to a gorilla. It brought you to the edge of the grave.
I saved you. Yet you could go and--God grant me patience. So I suppose
these unprincipled women lent you their stays to deceive your husband?"

"No. But they laughed at me so that--Oh, Christie, I'm a wretch; I kept
a pair at the Lucases, and a pair at Madame Cie's, and I put them on now
and then."

"But you never appeared here in them?"

"What, before my tyrant? Oh no, I dared not."

"So you took them off before you came home?"

Rosa hung her head, and said "Yes" in a reluctant whisper.