d? But it isn't a thing with which beauty has to do." He had
made the matter out with an acuteness for which I shouldn't have given
him credit. "What has happened to her is simply that--well, that nothing
has."

"Nothing has happened? But, my dear man, she has been married. That's
supposed to be something."

"Yes, but she has been married so little and so stupidly. It must be
desperately dull to be married to poor Briss. His comparative youth
doesn't, after all, make more of him. He's nothing but what he is. Her
clock has simply stopped. She looks no older--that's all."

"Ah, and a jolly good thing too, when you start where she did. But I
take your discrimination," I added, "as just. The only thing is that if
a woman doesn't grow older she may be said to grow younger; and if she
grows younger she may be supposed to grow prettier. That's all--except,
of course, that it strikes me as charming also for Brissenden himself.
_He_ had the face, I seem to recall, of a baby; so that if his wife did
flaunt her fifty years----!"

"Oh," Long broke in, "it wouldn't have mattered to him if she had.
That's the awfulness, don't you see? of the married state. People have
to get used to each other's charms as well as to their faults. He
wouldn't have noticed. It's only you and I who do, and the charm of it
is for _us_."

"What a lucky thing then," I laughed, "that, with Brissenden so out of
it and relegated to the time-table's obscure hereafter, it should be you
and I who enjoy her!" I had been struck in what he said with more things
than I could take up, and I think I must have looked at him, while he
talked, with a slight return of my first mystification. He talked as I
had never heard him--less and less like the heavy Adonis who had so
often "cut" me; and while he did so I was proportionately more conscious
of the change in him. He noticed in fact after a little the vague
confusion of my gaze and asked me--with complete good nature--why I
stared at him so hard. I sufficiently disembroiled myself to reply that
I could only be fascinated by the way he made his points; to which
he--with the same sociability--made answer that he, on the contrary,
more than suspected me, clever and critical as I was, of amusement at
his artless prattle. He stuck none the less to his idea that what we had
been discussing was lost on Brissenden. "Ah, then I hope," I said, "that
at least Lady John isn't!"

"Oh, Lady John----!" And he turned away as if