begun talking about Portia was that
it gave her an outlet for expressing her misgivings about her own
brother's marriage. Paula, of course, was a different thing altogether.

What a beautiful creature she was, even at eight o'clock in the morning
at the end of an abruptly terminated night's sleep. She looked lovelier
than ever as she came in through the shadowy doorway. She wasn't a true
blonde like Mary. Her thick strong hair was a sort of golden
glorification of brown, her skin a warm tone of ivory. Her eyes, set wide
apart, were brown, and the lashes, darker than her hair, enhanced the
size of them. The look of power about Paula, inseparable from her beauty,
was not one of Miss Wollaston's feminine ideals. It spoke in every line
of her figure as well as in the lineaments of her face; in the short,
rather broad, yet cleanly defined nose; in the generous width of her
mouth; in the sculpturesque poise of her neck upon her shoulders.

Paula's clothes, too, worried her elderly sister-in-law a little,
especially the house-dresses that she affected. They were beautiful,
heaven knew; more simply beautiful perhaps than it was right that
clothes should be. There was nothing indecent about them. Dear Paula was
almost surprisingly nice in those ways. But that thing she had on now,
for instance;--a tunic of ecru colored silk that she had pulled on over
her head, with a little over-dress of corn colored tulle, weighted
artfully here and there that it mightn't fly away. And a string of big
lumpish amber beads. She could have got into that costume in about two
minutes and there was probably next to nothing under it. From the
on-looker's point of view, it mightn't violate decorum at all; indeed,
clearly did not. But Miss Wollaston herself, if she hadn't been more or
less rigidly laced, stayed, gartered, pinched, pried and pulled about;
if she could have moved freely in any direction without an
admonitory--"take care"--from some bit of whalebone somewhere, wouldn't
have felt dressed at all. There ought to be something perpetually
penitential about clothes. The biblical story of the fall of man made
that clear, didn't it?

John sprang up as his wife came into the room; went around the table and
held her chair for her. "My dear, I didn't know I was robbing you of half
a night's sleep," he said. "You should have turned me out."

She reached up her strong white arms (the tulle sleeves did fall away
from them rather alarmingly, and Miss