Chapter XLucia Endicott, slim, sleek, groomed to the last degree, lolled in her seat in the drawing-room compartment and smoked one cigarette after another as she idly watched her pretty, contemptuous stepdaughter. She had hair like black satin cut sharply and close to her small round head, and her sharp features were somewhat accentuated by the points of hair that lay on her deeply tinted cheeks, and by the sharp lines of the deeply red lips that were startling against the pearly whiteness of her skin. She wore wriggly clanging earrings that seemed to have personalities like serpents, hired to go with her make-up, and her eyes were like two bright black stones that imprisoned something slimy and cruel. She was sitting in the conventional fashionable attitude, with a spine like a new moon,
