Burnett consistently describes Mary Lennox's mother using imagery of the ephemeral, the insubstantial, and the delicate. This woman, who is largely absent from Mary's quotidian life and is not caring or maternal, is as "full of lace" and as lacking in substance as her clothes. She cares only "to go to parties and amuse herself with gay people." Every part of her body is light, pretty and floating:
Her hair was like curly silk and she had a delicate little nose which seemed to be disdaining things, and she had large laughing eyes. All her clothes were thin and floating, and Mary said they were “full of lace.” They looked fuller of lace than ever this morning, but her eyes were not laughing at all.
This delicate imagery, evoking brightness and transience, foreshadows the light touch Mary's mother eventually has on her life. The lace is light in texture and mostly air, like her character. On the day she catches cholera, Mary observes that she is "more full of lace than ever," although she is not as cheerful as she usually appears.
The sensory images provided for the reader here create a feeling of something almost like absence. The textures of her clothing and body are central to her characterization, as there is little else to go on, and both "feel" so delicate. Burnett makes the reader aware of Mrs. Lennox's physicality but not of her interior world. She is a woman made entirely of surfaces.
Every time other characters mention Mary's mother, they refer to her beauty and not to her character. Mary is constantly compared to her in language that opposes Burnett's descriptions of the "Mem Sahib" (a term for white upper-class women, especially colonizers, living in India); her face is "dark," "glowering," and "heavy." Mrs. Lennox dies of cholera, as do the rest of Mary's family, a disease that wastes away and dehydrates the body before eventually killing the victim. Like the lace that Burnett associates with her, Mary's mother's beauty lies in the fact that she is more "gap" than "fabric:" lace is, after all, an artistic arrangement of holes. Mrs. Lennox quite literally fades away from the illness that kills her, becoming more and more like the lace she wears until she "disappears."
