a treatment.  I never sleep as I want to, nor bathe as I want to, nor even eat what I like.  It’s all somebody’s system for preserving something about me.  I’ve lived on celery and apples to keep from growing fat and taken daily massage to keep from getting thin—­and yet I never wake up in the morning that I don’t turn sick for fear I’ll discover my first wrinkle in the glass.  Now imagine,” she finished with a cynical laugh, “Perry going upon a diet for any sentimental reasons, or sacrificing terrapin in order to retain my affection!”

“I can’t,” confessed Laura bluntly, “it’s beyond me, but I wish you wouldn’t.  I wish you’d try to hold him by something different—­something higher.”

“You can’t hold a person by what he hasn’t got,” returned Gerty with the flippant ridicule she so desperately clung to—­a ridicule which she used as unsparingly upon herself as upon her husband.  Then, after a pause, she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner.  “A wrinkle would kill me,” she pursued; “I’d rather endure any agony—­I’d be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about.  Yet they must come—­they’re obliged to come in fifteen—­ten—­perhaps in five years.  Perhaps even to-morrow.  Do you suppose,” she questioned abruptly, with a tragic intensity worthy of a less ignoble cause, “that when one gets old one really ceases to mind—­that one dies out all inside—­the sensations I mean, and the emotions—­before the husk begins to wither?” She paused a moment, but as Laura continued to regard her with a soft, compassionate look she turned away again and, touching an electric button in the wall, flooded the room with light.  The change was so startling that every object seemed to leap at once from twilight vagueness into a conspicuous prominence.  On a chair in the corner was carelessly flung a white chiffon dinner gown, and a pair of little satin slippers had been thrown upon the floor beside it, where they lay slightly sideways, with turned-out toes, as they had fallen from the wearer’s feet.  The pathos which seems so often to dwell in trifling inanimate objects spoke to Laura from the little discarded shoes, and again society appeared to her as a hideous battle in which the passions preyed upon the ideals, the body upon the soul.  She thought of Perry Bridewell, of his healthy animalism, his complacent self-esteem, while her heart hardened within her.  Was love, when all was said, merely a subjection to the flesh instead of an enlargement of the spirit?  Did it depend for its very existence upon the dress-maker’s art and the primitive instinct of the chase?  Had it no soul within it to keep it clean?  Could it see or hear only through the eye or the ear of sense?

“O Gerty, Gerty,” she said, “if I could only make you see!”

But Gerty, with one of those swift changes of humour which made her moods at once so unexpected and so irresistible, had burst into a peal of mocking laughter.