It was here that Miss Wollaston chopped herself off short, hearing—­this time it was no false alarm—­Paula’s step in the hall.  She’d have been amazed, scandalized, profoundly indignant, dear good-hearted lady that she was, had some expert in the psychology of the unconscious pointed out to her that the reason she had begun talking about Portia was that it gave her an outlet for expressing her misgivings about her own brother’s marriage.  Paula, of course, was a different thing altogether.

What a beautiful creature she was, even at eight o’clock in the morning at the end of an abruptly terminated night’s sleep.  She looked lovelier than ever as she came in through the shadowy doorway.  She wasn’t a true blonde like Mary.  Her thick strong hair was a sort of golden glorification of brown, her skin a warm tone of ivory.  Her eyes, set wide apart, were brown, and the lashes, darker than her hair, enhanced the size of them.  The look of power about Paula, inseparable from her beauty, was not one of Miss Wollaston’s feminine ideals.  It spoke in every line of her figure as well as in the lineaments of her face; in the short, rather broad, yet cleanly defined nose; in the generous width of her mouth; in the sculpturesque poise of her neck upon her shoulders.

Paula’s clothes, too, worried her elderly sister-in-law a little, especially the house-dresses that she affected.  They were beautiful, heaven knew; more simply beautiful perhaps than it was right that clothes should be.  There was nothing indecent about them.  Dear Paula was almost surprisingly nice in those ways.  But that thing she had on now, for instance;—­a tunic of ecru colored silk that she had pulled on over her head, with a little over-dress of corn colored tulle, weighted artfully here and there that it mightn’t fly away.  And a string of big lumpish amber beads.  She could have got into that costume in about two minutes and there was probably next to nothing under it.  From the on-looker’s point of view, it mightn’t violate decorum at all; indeed, clearly did not.  But Miss Wollaston herself, if she hadn’t been more or less rigidly laced, stayed, gartered, pinched, pried and pulled about; if she could have moved freely in any direction without an admonitory—­“take care”—­from some bit of whalebone somewhere, wouldn’t have felt dressed at all.  There ought to be something perpetually penitential about clothes.  The biblical story of the fall of man made that clear, didn’t it?

John sprang up as his wife came into the room; went around the table and held her chair for her.  “My dear, I didn’t know I was robbing you of half a night’s sleep,” he said.  “You should have turned me out.”

She reached up her strong white arms (the tulle sleeves did fall away from them rather alarmingly, and Miss Wollaston concentrated her attention on the spiggot of the coffee urn) for his head as he bent over her and pulled it down for a kiss.

“I didn’t need any more sleep.  I had such a joyous time last night.  I sang the whole of Maliela, and a lot of Thais.  I don’t know what all.  Novelli’s a marvel; the best accompanist I’ve found yet.  But, oh, my darling, I did feel such a pig about it.”