Stephen thought she was pretty. She
could see it in his eyes when he looked at her; but her prettiness was
merely the bloom of youth, nothing more. It was not that changeless
beauty of structure--that beauty, as she recognized, of the very bone,
which made Mrs. Page perennially lovely. "In ten, fifteen, at the most
in twenty years, I shall have lost it all," she thought. "Then I shall
get fat and common looking; and everything will be over for me because a
little youthful colour and sparkle was all that I had. I have nothing to
hold on to--nothing that will last. I don't know anything--and yet how
could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I've had? In my
whole life I've never known a woman that could help me. I've had to find
out everything for myself--"

With her gaze still on the mirror, she laid the brush on its back of
pink celluloid--how much she had admired it when she bought it!--and
leaned forward with her hands clasped on the cover of the
dressing-table. Her hair still flying out from the strokes of the brush
surrounded her small eager face like a cloud. From the open neck of her
kimono, embroidered in a pattern of cranes and wistaria, the thin
girlish lines of her throat rose with an appealing fragility, like the
stem of some delicate flower.

"I wonder if Mother could have helped me if she had lived?" she asked
presently of her reflection. "I wonder if she was different from all the
other women I've known?" Through her mind there passed swiftly a hundred
memories of her childhood. First there came the one vivid recollection
of her mother, a flashing, graceful figure, as light as thistle-down, in
a skirt of spangled tulle that stood out from her knees. The face Patty
could not remember, but the spangles were indelibly impressed on her
mind, the spangles and a short silver wand, with a star on the end of
it, which that fairy-like figure had held over her cradle. Of her mother
this was all she had left, just this one unforgettable picture, and then
a long terrible night when she had not seen her, but had heard her
sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, somewhere in the darkness. The next day, when
she cried for her, they had said that she was gone, and the child had
never seen her again. In the place of her pretty mother there had been a
big, rugged man, whom she had never seen before, and when she cried this
man had taken her in his arms, and tried to quiet her. Afterward, when
she grew bigger and asked qu