“As if it mattered,” sighed Angela from her couch.  “As if it really mattered to me in the least.”

Mrs. Payne fixed upon her a painted pair of eyes set in lustreless vacancy between two flashing diamond earrings.  “That’s because you live so out of the world, my dear,” she observed, “that you have ceased to feel any longer a rational interest in life.”

“But is life all somebody’s impropriety?” enquired Angela, with the meekness of a child.

“It is that—­or charities,” returned Mrs. Payne.  “You may take your choice between the two.  It was only after I failed to interest you in our day nursery that I turned to the social news.”

“But you haven’t tried the sports,” suggested Laura, with a laugh, while she felt the presence of her aunts to have become an intolerable burden.

Mrs. Payne raised her blackened eyebrows, and sat smoothing out the crumpled paper with her claw-like jewelled fingers.  It seemed to Laura that she wore her body to-day as if it were a tattered, yet industriously mended garment for which her indomitable spirit would soon have no further use.  Everything about her was youthful except the flesh which wrapped her, and that was hideously, was grotesquely ancient.  Yet she had once been both a beauty and a belle, famed for her quick affairs and her careful indiscretions; and as Laura watched her she saw in this living decay but the inevitable end and weariness of pleasure.  Of her many lovers, which remained to her to-day?  With the multiplied sensations of her youth what had her loveless age to do?  She had hardly laid up even a sweetness of memories, or why did she feast upon uncovered scandals as a vulture upon carrion?

“What poor dear Angela needs is an object in life—­a passion,” remarked Mrs. Payne, picking up her gold-rimmed eye glasses which hung on a little jewelled chain from her bosom.  “I used to say that when I got too old for an emotion I wanted to be chloroformed, but I found, thank heaven, that with care one’s emotions may last one pretty well to one’s eightieth year.  When men fail one cards are left, and after cards, I daresay, there would come gossip.  It is for this reason,” she pursued with conviction, “that I am trying to persuade Angela to take up a little bridge.”

“A little bridge!” gasped Laura, and from sheer amazement she sat down on the foot of Angela’s couch.

“I was considering the moral support of it, of course,” resumed Mrs. Payne.  “First of all I would advise some inspiring religious conviction, but as religion does not appeal to her, I suggested bridge.”

“It might as well be white rabbits, I don’t see the difference,” protested Angela, rolling over upon her side with a despairing movement of fatigue.

“The difference, my dear, is that white rabbits are dirty little beasts,” observed the elder woman.

Angela lay back upon her sofa and regarded her sister with a smile sharp and cold as the edge of a knife.  “I wonder why you were more fortunate than I, Rosa,” she said, after a pause, “for in my heart I was always a better woman.”