While Leslie was noticing these things, Elinor Hadden stood by a window
with her back to the others. She did not complain at first; one doesn't
like to allow, at once, that the toothache, or a mischance like this
that had happened to her, is an established fact,--one is in for it the
moment one does that. But she had got a cinder in her eye; and though
she had winked, and stared, and rolled her eyelid under, and tried all
the approved and instinctive means, it seemed persistent; and she was
forced at last, just as her party was going in to dinner, to acknowledge
that this traveler's misery had befallen her, and to make up her mind
to the pain and wretchedness and ugliness of it for hours, if not even
for days. Her face was quite disfigured already; the afflicted eye was
bloodshot, and the whole cheek was red with tears and rubbing; she could
only follow blindly along, her handkerchief up, and, half groping into
the seat offered her, begin comfortlessly to help herself to some soup
with her left hand. There was leaning across to inquire and pity; there
were half a dozen things suggested, to which she could only reply,
forlornly and impatiently, "I've tried it.
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