f her
skirts! The sound of the "Blue Danube" was making her eyes bright and
setting her small head acock, and a proud but modest knowledge of how
more than one man was waiting for her in there and would be pleased and
confused by her kind mockery, twisted her mouth with the crooked smile
of the Campbells. Her innocence made her all sweet as a small, sound
strawberry lying unpicked in the leaves, and manifested itself in a way
that caused love and laughter in this absurd dress whose too thick
silk, too tangible lace, evidently proceeded from some theory of
allurement which one had thought all adults too sophisticated to hold.

Oh, she had been beautiful! Ellen looked down in pity on the snoring
face, and in the clairvoyance of her intense emotion she suddenly heard
again the crisp rustle of the silk and looked down on its yellowed but
immaculate surface, and perceived that its preservation disclosed a long
grief of her mother's. That dress had never been thrown, though they had
had to travel light when Mr. Melville was alive, and the bustled skirt
was a cumbrous thing to pack, because she had desired to keep some
relique of the days when she was so beautiful that an artist, a
professional, had wanted to paint her portrait. An inspiration occurred
to Ellen, and she bent down and said, "Mother, Richard and me'll go to
New York and see your portrait in the Museum there." The dying woman
jerked her head in a faint shadow of a bridle and made a pleased,
deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter's hand more firmly than she
had done for the last hour. Ellen wept, for though these things showed
that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed
that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it. She
remembered that that New Year's Eve, seven years before, before they had
gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror
and had sighed and said: "They last longer than anything else about a
woman, you know. Long after all the rest of you's old ye can keep a nice
arm. Ah, well! Be thankful you can keep that!" and she had gone upstairs
singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed! Go to bed!").

Of course she had hated growing old and ugly. It must be like finding
the fire going out and no more coal in the house. And it had been done
to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was
unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect,