the
eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be
tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed
that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold. Age had
simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that
she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies.
This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature
behaved like very lawless men. She was so young that till then she had
thought there were three fixed species of people--the young, the
middle-aged, and the old--and she had never before realised that young
people must become old, or stop living. She trembled with rage at this
arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this
humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind
passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer
the same fate. It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly
when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as
if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm
against Providence. She would have liked to run out into the sleeping
streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news
that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her
knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.

She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in
and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and
staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval. She was shocked, Ellen
perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her
mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with
speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl's reproach
into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple. But that
was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother,
because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.

Yet she knew, and knew it feverishly, because night emptied of sleep is
to the young a vacuum, in which their minds stagger about, that in a way
the nurse was right. If she had not been quite so clever she would never
have made her mother cry, as she had done more than once by snapping at
her when she had said stupid things. There rushed on her the
recollection of how she had once missed her mother from the fireside and
had thought no