Earle and a reassertion of her
former life of independent feminine activity had returned to her,
coupled with the crusading intention to enroll herself openly once more
in the army of new American women, whose impending victorious campaign
she had prophesied in her retort to Mrs. Williams's maledictions. She
had, in her own opinion, never ceased to belong to this army, and she
felt herself now more firmly convinced than ever that the course of life
of those who had turned a cold shoulder on her was hostile to the spirit
of American institutions. So far as her husband was concerned,
imaginative enterprise and the capacity to take advantage of
opportunities still seemed to her of the essence of fine character.
Indeed, she was not conscious of any change in her point of view. She
had resented Flossy's charge that she desired to be a social success,
and had declared that her wounded feelings were solely due to Flossy's
betrayal of friendship, not to balked social ambition. Consequently it
was no strain on her conscientiousness to feel that her real sentiments
had always been the same.
Nevertheless she scrutinized herself eagerly and long in her mirror, and
the process left her serious brow still clouded. She saw in the glass
features which seemed to her suggestive of superior womanhood, a slender
clear-cut nose, the nostrils of which dilated nervously, delicately
thin, compressed lips, a pale, transparent complexion, and clear,
steel-like, greenish-brown eyes looking straight and boldly from an
anxious forehead surmounted with a coiffure of elaborately and smoothly
arranged hair.
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