“You ought to eat,” replied Gabriella, briskly.  “When one gets run down, one never looks at life fairly.”  True to her fundamental common sense, she had never underestimated the importance of food as a prop for philosophy.

“I’d never eat if I could help it,” rejoined Miss Danton, with the abhorrence of the aesthetic temperament for material details.  “It’s queer the thoughts I have sometimes,” she added irrelevantly as she sat down before the kitchen table, and poured out a cup of tea.  “I don’t know what’s come over me, but I’d give anything on earth—­if it wasn’t wicked I’d almost give my soul—­to be your age and to be starting to live my life.  I never had any life.  It wasn’t fair.  I never had any,” she repeated bitterly, dropping a lump of sugar into her cup.

“Well, I’ve had my troubles, too,” observed Gabriella, busily stirring the oysters.

“You’ve had them and you’ll have others.  It doesn’t matter—­nothing really matters as long as you’re young.  It’s all a part of the game, trouble and everything else—­everything except old age and death.  I’m getting old—­I’m getting old, and I began too late, and that’s the worst that can happen to a woman.  Do you know I never had a love affair in my life,” she pursued bitterly after a moment.  “I never had love, or pleasure, or anything but work and duty—­and now it’s too late.  It’s too late for it all,” she finished, rising to take her toast from the oven.

“Poor thing, she exaggerates so dreadfully,” thought Gabriella.  “I believe it comes from drinking too much green tea”; and she resolved that she would never touch green tea as long as she lived.  Like most women whose love had ended not in unfulfilment, but in satiety and bitterness, she was inclined to deny the supreme importance of the passion in the scheme of life.  As a deserted wife and the mother of two children, she felt that she could live for years without the desire, without even the thought of romantic love in her mind.  “I wonder why I, who have known and lost love, should be so much freer from that obsession than poor Miss Danton, who has never been loved in her life?” she asked herself while she carried the supper tray down the long hall and into the living-room.

Some hours later, when the children were asleep, and Gabriella sat darning Archibald’s stockings beside the kerosene lamp, she described to Miss Polly the scene with Madame and Mrs. Pletheridge.

“I don’t know how it will end.  She may discharge me to-morrow,” she deliberated, as she cut off a length of black darning cotton, and bent over to thread her needle.  “I wonder what I ought to do?”