“That’s because I love you better than my ease and Horace loves you better than his foundling hospital,” replied Mrs. Payne.

Standing before the long mirror, Laura looked with a frown at the sable coat, which gave her, as Gerty had said, the air of a tragic actress.  Her dark hair, with its soft waves about the forehead, her brilliant eyes, and the delicate poetic charm of her figure, borrowed from the costly furs a distinction which Gerty felt to be less that of style than of personality.

“He will like me in this,” she thought; and then remembering the ermine wrap, which was becoming also, she wondered if another woman would buy it, if Kemper would see it at the opera, and if he would, perhaps, admire it again as he had done that day.

“If he does I shall regret these though they were so much more costly,” she concluded, “and my whole pleasure in them may be destroyed by a chance remark which he will let fall.”  She understood, all at once, the relentless tyranny which clothes might acquire—­the jealousy, the extravagance, the feverish emulation, and the dislike which one woman might feel for another who wore a better gown.  “Yet if I give my whole life to it there will always be someone who is richer, who is better dressed and more beautiful than I,” she thought.  “Though my individuality wins to-day, to-morrow I shall meet a woman beside whom I shall be utterly extinguished.  And there is no escape from this; it is inevitable and must happen.”  A shiver of disgust went through her, and it seemed to her that she saw her life as plainly as if the glass before her revealed her whole future and not merely her figure in the sable coat.  She shrank from her destiny, and yet she knew that in spite of herself, she must still follow it; she longed for her old freedom of spirit, and instead she struggled helplessly in the net which her own temperament cast about her.  “Is it possible that I can ever enter into this warfare which I have always despised?” she asked, “into this conflict of self against self, of vanity against vanity?  Shall I, like Gerty, grow to fear and to hate other women in my foolish effort to keep alive a passion which I know to be worthless?  Shall I even come in the end to feel terror and suspicion in my love for Gerty?” But this last thought was so terrible to her that she lacked the courage with which to face it, and so she put it now resolutely aside as she had learned to put aside at will all the disturbing questions which her conscience asked.

“I know that you are over head and ears in it all,” Gerty was saying, “and I shouldn’t have dropped in if I hadn’t just been called to the telephone by Arnold.  He was, of course, rushing off to a meeting about those everlasting mines—­Perry’s in it, too, and it’s really helped his mind to get the better of his lungs at last.”

“But I thought Arnold was coming this afternoon,” returned Laura, a little hurt.

With a laughing glance at Mrs. Payne, who sat counting silk stockings by the window, Gerty buried her face in her muff while she shook with unaffected merriment.