remarking that she was sorry
to disturb Mrs. Birch he replied that that was all right, and that she
always kept everybody waiting.

After this, through the haze of his perpetually renewed cigarettes, they
continued to chat for some time of indifferent topics; but when at last
Anna again suggested the possibility of her seeing Mrs. Birch he rose
from his corner with a slight shrug, and murmuring: "She's perfectly
hopeless," lounged off through an inner door.

Anna was still wondering when and in what conjunction of circumstances
the much-married Laura had acquired a partner so conspicuous for his
personal charms, when the young man returned to announce: "She says it's
all right, if you don't mind seeing her in bed."

He drew aside to let Anna pass, and she found herself in a dim untidy
scented room, with a pink curtain pinned across its single window, and
a lady with a great deal of fair hair and uncovered neck smiling at her
from a pink bed on which an immense powder-puff trailed.

"You don't mind, do you? He costs such a frightful lot that I
can't afford to send him off," Mrs. Birch explained, extending a
thickly-ringed hand to Anna, and leaving her in doubt as to whether the
person alluded to were her masseur or her husband. Before a reply was
possible there was a convulsive stir beneath the pink expanse, and
something that resembled another powder-puff hurled itself at Anna with
a volley of sounds like the popping of Lilliputian champagne corks. Mrs.
Birch, flinging herself forward, gasped out: "If you'd just give him
a caramel...there, in that box on the dressing-table...it's the only
earthly thing to stop him..." and when Anna had proffered this sop to
her assailant, and he had withdrawn with it beneath the bedspread, his
mistress sank back with a laugh.

"Isn't he a beauty? The Prince gave him to me down at Nice the other
day--but he's perfectly awful," she confessed, beaming intimately on her
visitor. In the roseate penumbra of the bed-curtains she presented to
Anna's startled gaze an odd chromo-like resemblance to Sophy Viner, or
a suggestion, rather, of what Sophy Viner might, with the years and in
spite of the powder-puff, become. Larger, blonder, heavier-featured,
she yet had glances and movements that disturbingly suggested what was
freshest and most engaging in the girl; and as she stretched her bare
plump arm across the bed she seemed to be pulling back the veil from
dingy distances of family history.