who was not a liar, and when she said it she had no doubt
that, for once, a woman was speaking the truth. Now, as she heard Mrs.
Wolfstein's curiously improper laugh, she frowned. The face in the
mirror changed and looked almost old.

This struck her unpleasantly. She kept the frown in its place and stared
from under it, examining her features closely, fancying herself really
an old woman, her whimsical fascination dead in its decaying home, her
powers faded if not fled for ever. She might do what she liked then.
It would all be of no use. Even the voice would be cracked and thin,
unresponsive, unwieldy. The will would be phlegmatic. If it were not,
the limbs and features would not easily obey its messages. The figure,
now beautiful, would perhaps be marred by the ungracious thickness, the
piteous fleshiness that Time often adds assiduously to ageing bodies, as
if with an ironic pretence of generously giving in one direction
while taking away in another. Decay would be setting in, life becoming
perpetual loss. The precious years would be gone irrevocably.

She let the frown go and looked again on her beauty and smiled. The
momentary bitterness passed. For there were many precious years to come
for her, many years of power. She was young. Her health was superb. Her
looks were of the kind that lasts. She thought of a famous actress whom
she resembled closely. This actress was already forty-three, and was
still a lovely woman, still toured about the world winning the hearts of
men, was still renowned for her personal charm, worshipped not only
for her talent but for her delicious skin, her great romantic eyes, her
thick, waving hair.

Lady Holme laughed. In twenty years what Robin Pierce called her "husk"
would still be an exquisite thing, and she would be going about without
hearing the horrible tap, tap of the crutch in whose sustaining power
she really believed so little. She knew men, and she said to herself, as
she had said to Robin, that for them beauty lies in the epidermis.

"Hullo, Vi, lookin' in the glass! 'Pon my soul, your vanity's
disgustin'. A plain woman like you ought to keep away from such
things--leave 'em to the Mrs. Wolfsteins--what?"

Lady Holme turned round in time to see her husband's blunt, brown
features twisted in the grimace which invariably preceded his portentous
laugh.

"I admire Mrs. Wolfstein," she said.

The laugh burst like a bomb.

"You admire another woman! Why, you're incapable