Cynthia was very beautiful, and was so well aware of this fact that
she had forgotten to care about it; no one with such loveliness ever
appeared so little conscious of it. Molly would watch her perpetually
as she moved about the room, with the free stately step of some wild
animal of the forest--moving almost, as it were, to the continual
sound of music. Her dress, too, though now to our ideas it would
be considered ugly and disfiguring, was suited to her complexion
and figure, and the fashion of it subdued within due bounds by her
exquisite taste. It was inexpensive enough, and the changes in it
were but few. Mrs. Gibson professed herself shocked to find that
Cynthia had but four gowns, when she might have stocked herself so
well, and brought over so many useful French patterns, if she had but
patiently waited for her mother's answer to the letter which she had
sent, announcing her return by the opportunity madame had found for
her. Molly was hurt for Cynthia at all these speeches; she thought
they implied that the pleasure which her mother felt in seeing her a
fortnight sooner after her two years' absence was inferior to that
which she would have received from a bundle of silver-paper patterns.
But Cynthia took no apparent notice of the frequent recurrence of
these small complaints. Indeed, she received much of what her mother
said with a kind of complete indifference, that made Mrs. Gibson hold
her rather in awe; and she was much more communicative to Molly than
to her own child. With regard to dress, however, Cynthia soon showed
that she was her mother's own daughter in the manner in which she
could use her deft and nimble fingers. She was a capital workwoman;
and, unlike Molly, who excelled in plain sewing, but had no notion of
dressmaking or millinery, she could repeat the fashions she had only
seen in passing along the streets of Boulogne, with one or two pretty
rapid movements of her hands, as she turned and twisted the ribbons
and gauze her mother furnished her with. So she refurbished Mrs.
Gibson's wardrobe; doing it all in a sort of contemptuous manner, the
source of which Molly could not quite make out.
Day after day the course of these small frivolities was broken in
upon by the news Mr. Gibson brought of Mrs. Hamley's nearer approach
to death. Molly--very often sitting by Cynthia, and surrounded by
ribbon, and wire, and net--heard the bulletins like the toll of a
funeral bell at a marriage feast. Her father sympathized with her. It
was the loss of a dear friend to him too; but he was so accustomed to
death, that it seemed to him but as it was, the natural end of all
things human. To Molly, the death of some one she had known so well
and loved so much, was a sad and gloomy phenomenon. She loathed the
small vanities with which she was surrounded, and would wander out
into the frosty garden, and pace the walk, which was both sheltered
and concealed by evergreens.