goes on as before, and there is a whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she is old—­ah, so old!—­under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty fripperies that caricature her lost youth!  No, my dear, you needn’t envy this woman!  Pity her, my dear!” pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a note of earnestness in her voice.

“Such a woman,” said Patricia, with distinctness, “deserves no pity.”

“Well,” Mrs. Pendomer conceded, drily, “she doesn’t get it.  Probably, because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist sloth and gluttony—­the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a pleasing or heroic figure.”

Mrs. Pendomer paused for a breathing-space, and smiled, though not very pleasantly.

“It is, doubtless,” said she, “a sight for gods—­and quite certainly for men—­to laugh at, this silly woman striving to regain a vanished frugality of waist.  Yes, I suppose it is amusing—­but it is also pitiful.  And it is more pitiful still if she has ever loved a man in the unreasoning way these shallow women sometimes do.  Men age so slowly; the men a girl first knows are young long after she has reached middle-age—­yes, they go on dancing cotillions and talking nonsense in the garden, long after she has taken to common-sense shoes.  And the man is still young—­and he cares for some other woman, who is young and has all that she has lost—­and it seems so unfair!” said Mrs. Pendomer.

Patricia regarded her for a moment.  The purple eyes were alert, their glance was hard.  “You seem to know all about this woman,” Patricia began, in a level voice.  “I have heard, of course, what everyone in Lichfield whispers about you and Rudolph.  I have even teased Rudolph about it, but until to-day I had believed it was a lie.”

“It is often a mistake to indulge in uncommon opinions,” said Mrs. Pendomer.  “You get more fun and interest out of it, I don’t deny, but the bill, my dear, is unconscionable.”

“So! you confess it!”

“My dear, and who am I to stand aside like a coward and see you make a mountain of this boy-and-girl affair—­an affair which Rudolph and I had practically forgotten—­oh, years ago!—­until to-day?  Why—­why, you can’t be jealous of me!” Mrs. Pendomer concluded, half-mockingly.

Patricia regarded her with deliberation.

In the windy sunlight, Mrs. Pendomer was a well-preserved woman, but, unmistakably, preserved; moreover, there was a great deal of her, and her nose was in need of a judicious application of powder, of which there was a superfluity behind her ears.  Was this the siren Patricia had dreaded?  Patricia clearly perceived that, whatever had been her husband’s relations with this woman, he had been manifestly entrapped into the imbroglio—­a victim to Mrs. Pendomer’s inordinate love of attention, which was, indeed, tolerably notorious; and Patricia’s anger against Rudolph Musgrave gave way to a rather contemptuous pity and a half-maternal remorse for not having taken better care of him.