There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs.Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.
Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her, obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no longer to look at her and her equipage at all.

Worst of all, something of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind.

She caught now and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her for years--as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.
And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.
Of open discord there had been next to none.

Celia would not permit it, and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need for her saying it.

It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words any of her desires, for that matter.