e her face. It sprang aside, revealing a
little toilette mirror. On the cushion beside her lay something
under a spread newspaper. She quickly drew off her sombre visiting
gloves; and lifting the newspaper, revealed under it a fresh pair
of gloves, pearl-colored. She worked her tinted hands nimbly into
these. Then she took out a rose-colored scarf or shawl as light as
a summer cloud. This she threw round her shoulders; it added no
warmth, it added color, meaning. There were a few other youthward
changes and additions; and then the brown silk curtain closed over
the mirror.

Another woman leaned back in a corner of the brougham. By a trick
of the face she had juggled away a generation of her years. The
hands were moved backward on the horologe of mortality as we move
backward the pointers on the dial of a clock: her face ticked at
the hour of two in the afternoon of life instead of half-past five.

There was still time enough left to be malicious.

VII

One morning about a week later she entered her carriage and was
driven rapidly away. A soft-faced, middle-aged woman with gray
ringlets and nervous eyes stepped timorously upon the veranda and
watched her departure with an expression of relief--Miss Harriet
Crane, the unredeemed daughter of the household.

She had been the only fruit of her mother's first marriage and she
still remained attached to the parental stem despite the most
vigorous wavings and shakings of that stem to shed its own product.
Nearly fifty years of wintry neglect and summer scorching had not
availed to disjoin Harriet from organic dependence upon her mother.
And of all conceivable failings in a child of hers that mother
could have found none so hard to forgive as the failure to attract
a man in a world full of men nearly all bent upon being attracted.

It was by no choice of Harriet's that she was born of a woman who
valued children as a kind of social collateral, high-class
investments to mature after long periods with at least reasonable
profits for the original investors. Nor was it by any volition of
hers that she had commended herself to her mother in the beginning
by being a beautiful and healthful child: initial pledge that she
could be relied upon to turn out lucrative in the end. The parent
herself was secretly astounded that she had given birth to a child
of so seraphic a disposition.

Trouble and disappointment began with education, for education is
long stout