When she had gone, Gabriella went back into the nursery, and stood looking down at little Frances, who had fallen asleep, with the smile of an angel on her face.  “I wonder if I can be the least bit like Jane?” she said aloud while she watched the sleeping child.

George did not come home to dinner; and the wonder was still in Gabriella’s mind when she dressed herself in her black net gown, and went downstairs to meet Florrie, who looked younger and more brilliant than ever in a dress of white and silver brocade.  Florrie’s husband, a dreamy, quiet man,—­the safe kind of man, Gabriella reflected, who inevitably marries a dangerous woman—­regarded his noisy wife with a guileless admiration which was triumphantly surviving a complete submergence in the sparkling shallows of Florrie’s personality.  He was a man of sense and of breeding.  He possessed the ordinary culture of a gentleman as well as the trained mind of a lawyer, yet he appeared impervious alike to the cheapness of Florrie’s wit and the vulgarity of her taste.  Her beauty had not only blinded him to her mental deficiencies; it had actually deluded him into a belief in her intelligence.  He treated her slangy sallies as if they were an original species of humour; he accepted the sweeping comment of her ignorance as if it had been an inspired criticism of life.  While she chattered, parrotlike, to the judge, who was obviously impressed by her appearance, Algernon listened to her ejaculatory conversation with a mixture of admiration and awe.

“How do you think Florrie is looking?” he asked in a low tone of Gabriella, while his wife’s laugh, high, shrill, penetrating in its dry soprano quality, fluted loudly on the opposite side of the table.  Beside Patty’s patrician loveliness, as serene and flawless as that of a marble goddess, Florrie appeared cheap, common, and merely pretty to Gabriella.  The hard brilliancy of her surface was like a shining polish which would wear off with sleep and have to be replenished each morning; and while she watched her, Gabriella saw, in imagination, a vaguely ominous outline surrounding her which might have been the uncertain edge of her mother’s shadow.  In twenty-five years Florrie would be the image of her mother—­protuberant hips, pinched waist, mottled complexion, and hopelessly tarnished hair; yet, with this awful prospect before him, Algernon could appear not only tolerant, but positively adoring.  He had seen Bessie—­he had known her for years—­and he could marry her daughter!

“I never saw her look handsomer,” said Gabriella, “that white and silver gown is very becoming.”

“That’s what I told her, but she wouldn’t believe me.  She thought it was too plain for her style.  Your sister-in-law is something of Florrie’s type, isn’t she?  Not quite so striking a figure, perhaps, but the same sort of colouring.”

Was it possible that for the first time in his life the simple Algernon was speaking in irony?  Turning in her chair, she looked questioningly into his kind, grave face, so empty of humour, into his serious gray eyes, which followed each movement of his wife’s with admiring attention.  No, he was not ironic; he was perfectly solemn.  It was a miracle—­a miracle not of piety, but of passion—­that she was witnessing.