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Updated: May 24, 2025
Her mother, Sidsall recognized, and the older women they knew, had a trace of this; but in the Manchu it was carried infinitely further, a most autocratic disdain. Her feeling for the other shifted rapidly from attitude to attitude. She watched, she was certain, these same sensations come over her Aunt Caroline Saltonstone, Mrs. Clifford and Mrs.
The layers of paint upset them, but Uncle Gerrit had explained, a little impatiently, that it was a Manchu custom, adding that the world couldn't be all measured and judged by Salem. Sidsall liked her rather than not, she decided; and determined to make an effort to know her better.
Suddenly the woman's glittering gaze, her expressionless face stiff with paint, the blaze of her barbaric colors, filled Sidsall with a shrinking that was almost dread. She was even more oppressed by an instinctive feeling of what she could express to herself only as cruelty hidden under the other's scented embroidery. At the same time her curiosity persisted, conquered.
"We wouldn't let him really bother us," Sidsall explained; "probably if he comes again we'll all be out." Taou Yuen made a comment in Chinese. "A bad thought is a secret knife," she continued; "it is more dangerous than the anger of the Emperor, a sickness that kills with the stink of bodies already dead." This seemed rather absurd to Sidsall.
Small wavering flames were being lighted on the musicians' hats; there were melancholy disconnected hoots from bassoons and the silver clear scale of a bugle. "Can't I get nearer, mother?" Laurel implored as usual. "Can't I go and see the little lamps on their heads?" "Sidsall and I will look after her," Roger Brevard put in, and almost immediately the three were entering Washington Square.
Roger Brevard turned from the consideration of Taou Yuen to the even more insistent claim of his increasing affection for Sidsall. He stopped again both to lament and delight in her youth another year and he would have unhesitatingly announced his feeling as love to them all. It was that, he admitted to himself almost shyly.
The leader, in the center of the flickering smoky illumination, now beat with his arms in one direction, now in another. A second selection followed, and a third, during which, in surprising pauses, the band shouted a concerted "Hurrah!" Sidsall was infinitely contented. How splendidly erect and calm and distinguished Roger Brevard was!
Sidsall was the most ingratiating she had Gerrit's direct kindling gaze; Janet showed no individuality yet beyond an entire willingness to conform to outward circumstance while pursuing deeply secret speculations within. But Camilla impressed the entire family by the rigidity of her correctness in personal and social niceties.
A stillness followed of unendurable length, in which he found his attention resting on the diversified shapes of the East India money in a corner cabinet. It was Sidsall who finally spoke, slowly and clearly: "Forgive me." He recognized that she was addressing her mother and father. From a whisper of skirts he realized that she was leaving the room.
Sidsall appeared and took her place with a collective greeting; while Laurel, coming out of her abstraction, realized that they were discussing the subject in which nearly every conversation now began or ended the solemn speculation of why her Uncle Gerrit Ammidon, master of the ship Nautilus, was so long overdue from China.
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