nterest in the social indiscretions of
one's neighbours was a fact which would have been pathetic had it been
less ridiculous. Tottering reluctantly to her grave, in the centre of a
universe filled with a million mysteries of dead and living suns, she
was absorbed to the exclusion of all larger matters in the question as
to whether or not "Tom Marbury had compromised Mrs. Billy Pearce?"

"As if it mattered," sighed Angela from her couch. "As if it really
mattered to me in the least."

Mrs. Payne fixed upon her a painted pair of eyes set in lustreless
vacancy between two flashing diamond earrings. "That's because you live
so out of the world, my dear," she observed, "that you have ceased to
feel any longer a rational interest in life."

"But is life all somebody's impropriety?" enquired Angela, with the
meekness of a child.

"It is that--or charities," returned Mrs. Payne. "You may take your
choice between the two. It was only after I failed to interest you in
our day nursery that I turned to the social news."

"But you haven't tried the sports," suggested Laura, with a laugh, while
she felt the presence of her aunts to have become an intolerable burden.

Mrs. Payne raised her blackened eyebrows, and sat smoothing out the
crumpled paper with her claw-like jewelled fingers. It seemed to Laura
that she wore her body to-day as if it were a tattered, yet
industriously mended garment for which her indomitable spirit would soon
have no further use. Everything about her was youthful except the flesh
which wrapped her, and that was hideously, was grotesquely ancient. Yet
she had once been both a beauty and a belle, famed for her quick
affairs and her careful indiscretions; and as Laura watched her she saw
in this living decay but the inevitable end and weariness of pleasure.
Of her many lovers, which remained to her to-day? With the multiplied
sensations of her youth what had her loveless age to do? She had hardly
laid up even a sweetness of memories, or why did she feast upon
uncovered scandals as a vulture upon carrion?

"What poor dear Angela needs is an object in life--a passion," remarked
Mrs. Payne, picking up her gold-rimmed eye glasses which hung on a
little jewelled chain from her bosom. "I used to say that when I got too
old for an emotion I wanted to be chloroformed, but I found, thank
heaven, that with care one's emotions may last one pretty well to one's
eightieth year. When men fail one cards are left, and a