Constraint deepened as the visit was prolonged.  Mrs. Conyers begged Mrs. Meredith for a recipe that she knew to be bad; and when Mrs. Meredith had left the room for it, she rose and looked eagerly out of the windows for any sign of Rowan.  When Mrs. Meredith returned, for the same reason she asked to be taken into the garden, which was in its splendor of bloom.  Mrs. Meredith culled for her a few of the most resplendent blossoms—­she could not have offered to any one anything less.  Mrs. Conyers was careful not to pin any one of these on; she had discovered that she possessed a peculiarity known to some florists and concealed by those women who suffer from it—­that flowers soon wilt when worn by them.

Meanwhile as they walked she talked of flowers, of housekeeping; she discussed Marguerite’s coming ball and Dent’s brilliant graduation.  She enlarged upon this, praising Dent to the disparagement of her own grandson Victor, now in retreat from college on account of an injury received as centre-rush in his football team.  Victor, she protested, was above education; his college was a kind of dormitory to athletics.

When we are most earnest ourselves, we are surest to feel the lack of earnestness in others; sincerity stirred to the depths will tolerate nothing less.  It thus becomes a new test of a companion.  So a weak solution may not reveal a poison when a strong one will.  Mrs. Meredith felt this morning as never before the real nature of the woman over whom for years she had tried to throw a concealing charity; and Mrs. Conyers saw as never before in what an impossible soil she had tried to plant poison oak and call it castle ivy.

The ladies parted with coldness.  When she was once more seated in her carriage, Mrs. Conyers thrust her head through the window and told the coachman to drive slowly.  She tossed the recipe into a pine tree and took in her head.  Then she caught hold of a brown silk cord attached to a little brown silk curtain in the front of the brougham opposite her face.  It sprang aside, revealing a little toilette mirror.  On the cushion beside her lay something under a spread newspaper.  She quickly drew off her sombre visiting gloves; and lifting the newspaper, revealed under it a fresh pair of gloves, pearl-colored.  She worked her tinted hands nimbly into these.  Then she took out a rose-colored scarf or shawl as light as a summer cloud.  This she threw round her shoulders; it added no warmth, it added color, meaning.  There were a few other youthward changes and additions; and then the brown silk curtain closed over the mirror.

Another woman leaned back in a corner of the brougham.  By a trick of the face she had juggled away a generation of her years.  The hands were moved backward on the horologe of mortality as we move backward the pointers on the dial of a clock:  her face ticked at the hour of two in the afternoon of life instead of half-past five.