fortunes of the plays with a complete discrimination in every
possible emotional display and crisis.

Lithe actresses in a revealing severity of attire, like spoiled nuns
with carmine lips, suffering in ingenuous problems of the passions,
agonized in shuddering tones; or else they went to concerts to hear
young violinists, slender, with intense faces and dramatic hair,
play concertos that irritated Linda with little shivers of delight.

Sometimes they had lunch in a restaurant of Circassian walnut and
velvet carpets, with cocktails, and eggs elaborate with truffles and
French pastry. Then, afterward, they would stop at a confectioner's,
or at a cafe where there was dancing, for tea. They all danced in a
perfection of slow graceful abandon, with youths who, it seemed to
Linda, did nothing else.

She accepted her part in this existence as inevitable, yet she was
persistently aware of a feeling of strangeness, of essential
difference from it. She was unable to lose a sense of looking on, as
if morning, noon and night she were at another long play. Linda
regarded it--as she did so much else--with neither enthusiasm nor
marked annoyance. Probably it would continue without change through
her entire life. All that was necessary, and easily obtained, was a
sufficient amount of money.

Her manner, Pansy specially complained, was not intimate and
inviting; in her room Linda usually closed the door; the frank
community of the sisters was distasteful to her. She demanded an
extraordinary amount of personal privacy. Linda never consulted
Judith's opinion about her clothes, nor exchanged the more