every time she looked, she was
horrified and alarmed to see deep lines of thought, of hope, of
impatience, of emotion, criss-crossing fatally on her face.

Then she would sit down before her curving dressing-table, gather the
folds of her Persian room-dress about her, lift up her soul and go
through those mental and physical relaxing exercises which the wonderful
lecturer of last winter had explained. She let her head and shoulders
and neck droop like a wilted flower-stem, while she took into her mind
the greater beauty of a wilted flower over the crass rigidity of a
growing one; she breathed deeply and slowly and rhythmically, and
summoned to her mind far-off and rarely, difficultly, beautiful things;
the tranquil resignation of Chinese roofs, tempered with the merry human
note of their tilted corners; Arabian traceries; cunningly wrought,
depraved wood-carvings in the corners of Gothic cathedrals; the gay and
amusing pink rotundities of a Boucher ceiling. When she felt her face
calm and unlined again, she put on a little massage cream, to make
doubly sure, and rubbed it along where the lines of emotion had been.

But half an hour afterwards, as she lay stretched in the chaise-longue
by the window, reading Claudel, or Strindberg, or Remy de Gourmont, she
would suddenly find that she was not thinking of what was on the page,
that she saw there only Marise's troubled eyes while she and Marsh
talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to
their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the
foolishness of the parents' notion that they would be formative elements
in the children's lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did
succeed in forcing themselves into the children's lives, the danger of
sexual mother-complexes. Eugenia found that instead of thrilling
voluptuously, as she knew she ought, to the precious pain and
bewilderment of one of the thwarted characters of James Joyce, she was,
with a disconcerting and painful eagerness of her own, bringing up to
mind the daunted silence Marise kept when they mentioned the fact that
of course everybody nowadays knew that children are much better off in a
big, numerous, robust group than in the nervous, tight isolation of
family life; and that a really trained educator could look out for them
much better than any mother, because he could let them alone as a mother
never could.

She found that such evocations of facts poignantly vital to her