"
Her aunt, still in lavender silk negligee, so far progressed towards
the day's toilet as to have her hair carefully dressed, looked up
from the _Revue Bleue_, and nodded. Her expression was one of quiet
self-possession.
Sylvia came closer to her and sat down on a straight-backed chair. She
was dressed for the street, and hatted, as though she herself had
gone out to mail the letter. "And now, Tantine," she said, with the
resolute air of one broaching a difficult subject, "I think I ought to
be planning to go home very soon." It was a momentous speech, and a
momentous pause followed it. It had occurred to Sylvia, still shaken
with the struggle over the question of secrecy, that she could,
in decency, only offer to take herself away, after so violently
antagonizing her hostess. She realized with what crude intolerance she
had attacked the other woman's position, how absolutely with claw and
talon she had demolished it. She smarted with the sense that she
had seemed oblivious of an "obligation." She detested the sense of
obligation. And having become aware of a debt due her dignity, she had
paid it hastily, on the impulse of the moment. But as the words still
echoed in the air, she was struck to see how absolutely her immediate
future, all her future, perhaps, depended on the outcome of that
conversation she herself had begun. She looked fixedly at her aunt,
trying to prepare herself for anything.
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