Laura sighed faintly and contentedly. Everybody was back in town. The season was beginning.
She switched on the light. The cream coloured blind completed the circle of coquettish intimacy. She sat down at her dressing table. In the mirror she saw a face which still retained the seaside sunburn. It suited her well, made her hair still fairer and her teeth whiter. Laura was now a woman of thirty. There was something of the fair renaissance type in her plumpness, something at one and the same time crude and refined. Her quick smile was full of health and light impudence.
But just now Laura was not smiling. On the whole women are never so serious as when they are occupied with their personal appearance. During the siege of the Legations during the Boxers’ rising in China it is told that a lady stole yolks of eggs, whilst people died of starvation all round her, in order to preserve the colour of her hair. That is serious....
Laura always had a long tête-à-tête with her face before she paraded it in public.
She became very impatient as somebody hesitatingly fingered the door handle and little Georg at last stepped in.
Georg was very like his father. He had his long face and fair eyes. In this case the weaker had been the stronger. It looked like nature’s revenge. She had always the image of the wronged father before her.
Georg smiled the hesitating smile of the neglected child. There was a certain shyness about him as he crept up to the mother.
Laura’s face hardened as she turned from the mirror:
“Mummie darling, may I stay up a little longer?”
“But mummie, why must I always go to bed when people come?”
“That’s enough. Run away now. I’m in a hurry!”
He went slowly, looking troubled, but he stopped at the door:
“May I sit and play in bed a little at least?”
Then Georg went to bed. And in bed he sat and drew a picture of his mummie as a hobgoblin. But then he grew frightened of what he had done and drew her as a princess. And when Sofi came to pull down the blind he lay awake in the twilight and listened to the guests. He was accustomed to lie in the darkness and enjoy Laura’s parties through closed doors.
Just after the divorce, whilst Laura still felt her position to be delicate, she had cultivated the ladies, well knowing that it is they who make one’s position. Then she availed herself of every opportunity to pose as a deserted mother with her little baby. But her baby grew up and the ladies bored Laura. Nor did they feel very much drawn to Laura. It was not that she made any mistakes. On the contrary, at first she was very careful about her reputation. But she made her friends restless in some way. They did not like to see her entertain their husbands. They gradually held aloof. Only the eccentrics and the bohemians among them remained faithful to her, including a fashionable woman sculptor and a middle-aged baroness who wrote causeries on the fashions.