d an impregnable position and that she was having
a wonderful time. But she was really a very unhappy woman at violent
odds with herself.

On one occasion when she was giving a dinner in her house a discussion
broke out on the question of happiness. It was asked by someone, "If you
could demand of the gods one gift, with the certainty of receiving
it, what gift would you demand?" Various answers were given. One said,
"Youth for as long as I lived"; another "Perfect health"; another
"Supreme beauty"; another "The most brilliant intellect of my time";
another "The love and admiration of all I came in contact with."
Finally a sad-looking elderly man, poet, philosopher, and the former
administrator of a great province in India, was appealed to. His answer
was, "Complete peace of mind." And on his answer followed the general
discussion about happiness.

When the party broke up and Lady Sellingworth was alone she thought
almost desperately about that discussion and about the last answer to
the question which had been put.

Complete peace of mind! How extraordinary it would be to possess that!
She could scarcely conceive of it, and it seemed to her that even in her
most wonderful days, in her radiant and careless youth, when she had
had almost everything, she had never had that. But then she had not even
wanted to have it. Complete peace seems but a chilly sort of thing to
youth in its quick-silver time. But later on in life we love combat
less.

Suddenly Lady Sellingworth realized the age of her mind, and it seemed
to her that she was a horrible mixture of incongruities. She was
physically aging slowly but surely. She had appetites which were in
direct conflict with age. She had desires all of which turned towards
youth. And her mind was quite old. It must be, she said to herself,
because now she was sitting still and longing to know that complete
peace of mind which an old man had talked of that evening at her dinner
table.

A sort of panic shook her as she thought of all the antagonists which at
a certain period of life gather together to attack and slay youth, all
vestiges of youth, in the human being; the unsatisfied appetites,
the revolts of the body, the wearinesses of soul, and the subtle and
contradictory desires which lie hidden deep in the mind.

She was now intensely careful about her body, had brought its care
almost to the level of a finely finished art. But she had not troubled
about the disciplining of