"I hear it."
She threaded the finest needle she had by feel, because looking up would have cost her a second, and began. Her hands did the work; her ears did the rest.
"And of course, they will not receive her now," Mrs. Gauthorpe was saying. "One does not, after a thing like that. I am sorry for her, and I say so freely. But there is such a thing as the standard of a place. And if the standard of a place is not kept, then what is anybody's daughter worth?"
"She looked very ill," Miss Gauthorpe said.
"She has had a great deal to bear, and she has borne none of it well. Hold still, child."
"I am holding still. It is the girl who is moving."
Catherine drew the net together, stitch by stitch, so small that the thread went in and out of the same shadow. Above her head, the two of them discussed a woman who was thirty feet away in the ballroom, wearing a gown Catherine had made over from her mother's wedding silk that spring. The family had come down in the world; they could not buy new and would not be seen not to. She had put four days into that gown and had matched the new breadths so carefully that even in daylight you had to look twice. Nobody had looked twice. They had all simply known, the way a county always knows.
"There," Catherine said, and bit the thread.
Miss Gauthorpe turned in front of the glass and shook the flounce out. "Where is it?"
"Three inches above the hem, miss. Left side."
"I cannot see it."
"No, miss."
"How very clever," said Mrs. Gauthorpe in the voice a person uses for a dog that has done a trick, and put sixpence on the corner of the washstand rather than into Catherine's hand, and went out.
The door swung. The music came in loud for a moment. Then it shut, and the room went back to the tallow and the violet powder and the jug of water going cold.