Are you content with to conduct your life.
As a cliché and, what's worse,.
An anachronism, the brooding artist's demimonde?-.
Here we can see that the mother is trying to hold it together and not tell her child what she is really thinking by the smile. But she thinks that the way her daughter is living her life is beneath her. Which reinstates that the mother thinks she is better than what she is doing. By Dove's use of the word "anachronism- she means that her daughter is out of order, being this moody artist's prostitute.
The daughter goes on, unaware of her mother's disdain for what is going on in her daughter's life. Feeling proud of their accomplishments in Paris, where they owned a small gallery, she goes on to say that the Parisians had an admiration for them. We see where the mother is feeling hurt again by what she sees next:.
"The Chateaubriand.
arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute.
in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming.
like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy;.
one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming."".
We see here that "The Chateaubriand- is a representation of the mother with the daughter cutting quickly into the beef, in essence cutting into her mother's heart. This idea is reinforced in the beginning of the next stanza by the word bloody, which is used to describe the type of wine that her daughter is drinking.
Continuing on the mother knows that her daughter has posed nude for her man, the artist. The mother asks to stop by the studio to see the new work but the daughter rejects the offer in a tactful way. The daughter goes on to explain what her man is wearing and what he has her dressed in, bright colors to show himself off even more, since he dresses all in black. But she states that she tends towards more "muted shades-. Her mother sees that and looking at her daughter notices that she dresses that way to be less noticeable.