La Vie Boheme

It's a start!

912 words, and I should really head off to bed. Before I go, however, I'll leave you with a small sample:

Chaela sat meekly, smiling into her reflection in the glass while Enid put the last pins in place, creating smooth loops of gold that fell around the girl's delicate features. Catriona looked on with her smile tinged with wistfulness. Chaela was the picture of delicate beauty sung in the praises of all the troubadours who passed their way: fair skin so pale it nearly showed blue, fine golden hair that behaved in perfect curls, eyes of deepest violet. It was impossible for Catriona to look at their two reflections in the mirror and not find herself lacking. Where Chaela had seen seventeen summers, and was at the peak of her charm, Catriona felt every one of her twenty-two years, and bore the name 'spinster' with as much grace as she could manage. But even in her prime, she realized, she would never have competed with her younger sister. Looking in the mirror, Catriona thought her golden brown hair too dark and dim, her gray eyes too nondescript to attract notice. It was easy to lay the blame for her unmarried state on the untimely death of their father three years earlier, leaving her to manage the estate and care for Chaela, but when she looked at her sister, she felt the real truth of the matter lay in the mirror before them.