Yet,
after dinner, in the little sitting-room, where the Duchess, in a white
gown with great pink bows, fitter for a girl fresh from Confirmation, and
her cheeks with their fixed colour, which changed only at the discretion
of her maid, babbled of nothing that mattered, Hylda's mind kept turning
to the book of life an unhappy woman had left behind her. The
sitting-room had been that of the late Countess also, and on the wall was
an oil-painting of her, stately and distant and not very alluring, though
the mouth had a sweetness which seemed unable to break into a smile.
"What was she really like--that wasn't her quite, was it?" asked Hylda,
at last, leaning her chin on the hand which held the 'cello she had been
playing.
"Oh, yes, it's Sybil Eglington, my dear, but done in wood; and she wasn't
the graven image that makes her out to be. That's as most people saw her;
as the fellow that painted her saw her; but she had another side to her.
She disapproved of me rather, because I was squeezing the orange dry, and
trying to find yesterday's roses in to-morrow's garden.
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