ought I was
going mad when I saw her, but I never suspected the truth. The light
was dim and I took for granted that some one of those beauty experts
had made a mask for her, or ripped her skin off--I hardly knew what to
think, so I concluded not to think about it at all, and succeeded
fairly well in dismissing it from my mind. I was deeply hurt at her
lack of confidence in me, but I dismissed that, too. After all it was
her right. I do as I choose, why shouldn't she? And I remembered that
she always did."

Here Clavering stirred uneasily.

"When she came to me here last Tuesday and told me the whole truth I
felt as if I were listening to a new chapter out of the Bible, but on
the whole I was rather pleased than otherwise. I had never been
jealous of her when we were young, for I was married before she came
out, and she was so lovely to look at that I was rather grateful to her
than otherwise. After her marriage I used to meet her every few years
in Europe up to some three or four years before the outbreak of the
war, and it often made me feel melancholy as I saw her beauty
going . . . until there was nothing left but her style and her hair.
But nothing else was to be expected. Time is a brute to all
women. . . . So, while she sat here in this room so radiantly
beautiful and so exquisitely and becomingly dressed, and leaning toward
me with that old pleading expression I remembered so well; when she
wanted something and knew exactly how to go to work to get it; and
looking not a day over thirty--well, while she was here I felt young
again myself and I loved her as much as ever and felt it a privilege to
look at her. I arranged a luncheon promptly to meet several of her old
friends and put a stop to the clacking that was going on--I had been
called up eight times that morning. . . . I could have boxed your
ears, but of course it was a natural enough thing to do, and you had no
suspicion. . . . Well, as soon as she had gone I wrote to twelve
women, giving them a bare sketch of the truth, and sent the notes off
in the motor. And then--I went and looked at myself in the glass."

She paused, and Clavering rose involuntarily and put his hand on her
shoulder.

"Never mind, Jane," he said awkwardly. "What does it matter? You are
you and there's only one of the kind. After all it's only one more
miracle of Science. You could do it yourself if you liked."

"I? Ha! With twenty-three grandchildren. I may be