Mrs. Whitney did not understand this beyond getting from it a vague sense that she had somehow been thrust at.  “You must be careful of that skin of yours, Adele,” she thrust back.  “I’ve been looking at it.  You can’t have been home long, yet the exposure to the sun is beginning to show.  You have one of those difficult, thin skins, and one’s skin is more than half one’s beauty.  You ought never to go out without a veil.  The last thing Ross said to me was, ‘Do tell Adelaide to keep her color down.’  You know he admires the patrician style.”

Adelaide could not conceal the effect of the shot.  Her skin was a great trial to her, it burned so easily; and she hated wrapping herself in under broad brims and thick veils when the feeling of bareheadedness was so delightful.  “At any rate,” said she sweetly, “it’s easier to keep color down than to keep it up.”

Mrs. Whitney pretended not to hear.  She was now at the window which gave on the garden by way of a small balcony.  “There’s your father!” she exclaimed; “let’s go to him.”

There, indeed, was Hiram, pacing the walk along the end of the garden with a ponderousness in the movements of his big form that bespoke age and effort.  It irritated Mrs. Whitney to look at him, as it had irritated her to look at Ellen; very painful were the reminders of the ravages of time from these people of about her own age, these whom she as a child had known as children.  Crow’s-feet and breaking contour and thin hair in those we have known only as grown people, do not affect us; but the same signs in lifelong acquaintances make it impossible to ignore Decay holding up the mirror to us and pointing to aging mouth and throat, as he wags his hideous head and says, “Soon—­you, too!”

Hiram saw Matilda and his daughter the instant they appeared on the balcony, but he gave no hint of it until they were in the path of his monotonous march.  He was nerving himself for Mrs. Whitney as one nerves himself in a dentist’s chair for the descent of the grinder upon a sensitive tooth.  Usually she got no further than her first sentence before irritating him.  To-day the very sight of her filled him with seemingly causeless anger.  There was a time when he, watching Matilda improve away from her beginnings as the ignorant and awkward daughter of the keeper of a small hotel, had approved of her and had wished that Ellen would give more time to the matter of looks.  But latterly he had come to the conclusion that a woman has to choose between improving her exterior and improving her interior, and that it is impossible or all but impossible for her to do both; he therefore found in Ellen’s very indifference to exteriors another reason why she seemed to him so splendidly the opposite of Charles’s wife.

“You certainly look the same as ever, Hiram,” Matilda said, advancing with extended, beautifully gloved hand.  The expression of his eyes as he turned them upon her gave her a shock, but she forced the smile back into her face and went on, “Ross says you always make him think of a tower on top of a high hill, one that has always stood there and always will.”