Her grey eyes, perhaps it was the strangeness of their straight-drawn upper lids, were dazed and dim in expression.

She ate little, leaned limply on her elbows, and sometimes rubbed her hands over her face, and sat so, her fingers in her hair, for a languid moment.

Dinner was only half over when she rose and went away, her black dress trailing behind her, and a moon-like space of neck visible between her heavily-clustered hair and the gauze scarf.
Althea could not have said why, but for the rest of the meal, and after she had gone back to her sitting-room, the thought of the young lady in black remained almost oppressively with her.
She had felt empty and aimless before seeing her; since seeing her she felt more empty, more aimless than ever.

It was an absurd impression, and she tried to shake it off with the help of a recent volume of literary criticism, but it coloured her mind as though a drop of some potent chemical had been tipped into her uncomfortable yet indefinable mood, and had suddenly made visible in it all sorts of latent elements.
It was curious to feel, as a deep conviction about a perfect stranger, that though the young lady in black might often know moods, they would never be undefined ones; to be sure that, however little she had, she would always accurately know what she wanted.

The effect of seeing some one so hard, so clear, so alien, was much as if, a gracefully moulded but fragile earthenware pot, she had suddenly, while floating down the stream, found herself crashing against the bronze vessel of the fable.
A corrective to this morbid state of mind came to her with the evening post, and in the form of a thick letter bearing the Boston postmark.
Franklin Winslow Kane had not occurred to Althea as an alternative to the various forms of dignified extinction with which her imagination had been occupied that afternoon.