She saw herself, charming and demure, wearing a fluffy
idealization of the dress her mother now determinedly struggled
with upstairs; she saw herself framed in a garlanded archway, the
entrance to a ballroom, and saw the people on the shining floor
turning dramatically to look at her; then from all points a rush
of young men shouting for dances with her; and she constructed a
superb stranger, tall, dark, masterfully smiling, who swung her
out of the clamouring group as the music began. She saw herself
dancing with him, saw the half-troubled smile she would give him;
and she accurately smiled that smile as she rinsed the knives and
forks.
These hopeful fragments of drama were not to be realized, she
knew; but she played that they were true, and went on creating
them. In all of them she wore or carried flowers--her mother's
sorrow for her in this detail but made it the more important--and
she saw herself glamorous with orchids; discarded these for
an armful of long-stemmed, heavy roses; tossed them away for a
great bouquet of white camellias; and so wandered down a
lengthening hothouse gallery of floral beauty, all costly and
beyond her reach except in such a wistful day-dream. And upon
her present whole horizon, though she searched it earnestly, she
could discover no figure of a sender of flowers.
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