Chapter summary: Bella's visit with 'Lillian' Hale is brief but powerful, as she finds herself wanting in comparing herself to the preternaturally beautiful and unaccountably hostile newcomer.

It was hard for me to decide who was the more beautiful: Edward or Lillian. It seemed, paradoxically enough, that Dr. Hale and Mrs. Hale had both married up. Edward was rapier sharp, both in mind and in his well-chiseled body, handsome beyond compare, but Lillian ...

Even though the lighting was dimmed, I had never seen someone as beautiful as Lillian. Her hair was long, blond, with an ever-so-slight wave to it that teased into a curl at the very end. A girl in bed should not be allowed to have hair as this. Her face set the Norwegian girls looks to shame. And speaking of looks, which I didn't want to because my plain ones suffered in comparison, from what I could see of her upright position on the bed, she had a perfect hourglass figure, with a bosom that would make the boys in town forget that she had a face ... if that was possible, because her full, pouting lips would be calling them to romance. The boys would be checking their brains at the door, what little of them that they had, as her eyes drunk their eyes drinking her in.

Everything about her screamed her perfection, and my lack.

And her eyes: they were the strangest color. Almost the same color as Edward's hair: yellow, with flecks of red? Bronze-ish? Hazel-Brown? Rusty gold? Was there such a thing as 'part albino'? Both families were very pale, and it was hard to tell in this light if Lillian was pure snow white. She looked it. But didn't albinos have blood red eyes? I guessed Lillian had red in her eyes, but they were yellowish-red, not orange, and not pure red like an albino's were supposed to be. And weren't albino's hair color bleached, too? I wasn't sure. But what I was sure of was that Lillian was terrifyingly, soul-crushingly, beautiful. She was simply the most beautiful woman in the world. All I could do was stand there and gape like the complete idiot that I was.

Edward rescued me. I sent a silent prayer of gratitude for his gallantry. "Lillian," he murmured quietly, "this is Bella, who is Sheriff Swan's daughter. She and her father showed your brother and me around town last night."

Lillian looked me up and down dismissively. No, her eyes weren't exactly dismissive; there was an edge to them: they were hard ... hate-filled. I wished I could have turned into a cockroach and crawled away; that would have been an improvement as to how I felt now.

"So, this is the erudite Bella Swan that you've been talking about, Edward." I could hear the sneer underneath her melodious pleasantry.

"How nice to meet you."

I doubted that.

"Ummm." And the award for the wittiest répartée goes to ... Bella Swan! Thank you. Thank you all so much. No applause, please, just throw money.

Edward, again. "Bella wished to see how you are recovering and offer any assistance. Right, Bella?"

He said this quietly, but did I hear a smile in his voice?

"Ummm, yes?" Speaking still seems to be a rather difficult concept to grasp in the face of such a presence. She stunned me. I felt her physically overwhelming my senses. It was like what Edward did to me the first day he glared at me. She was doing the same thing, but, unlike Edward, who let me recover by leaving the courthouse, she wasn't going anywhere. I was a sparrow transfixed by a cobra.

She looked me over again. And, again, I felt altogether wanting. Then she looked over to Edward questioningly, then back to me.

I heard Edward exhale quietly as she answered. "That's very kind of you, Bella." She said this, strangely enough, with a twinge of sadness. "Now, I must apologize, but if you'll excuse me, but I need to rest." She did look very tired, so I murmured an 'of course' and stepped out of her room. Edward accompanied me back to the sitting room, lost in his own thoughts, as I was in mine.

Pa said our good-byes, and we walked back to our horses. We rode silently back to the courthouse. I had some thinking to do, and the basement archives was the perfect place to do that thinking. Pa's parting comment didn't help any: "What wrong with you, Bell? It looks like you saw a ghost."