Sitting before her dressing-table she glanced over the room, which was hung with the gaily decorated chintz she had bought after months of secret longing for roses and hollyhocks in her bedroom.  Now she felt that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to colour.  She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something better.  Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled chin.  From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but the thought in her mind was simply, “The powder I use is too white.  Those women to-night used powder that did not show.  I must get some to-morrow.”  She was pretty,—­even Stephen thought she was pretty.  She could see it in his eyes when he looked at her; but her prettiness was merely the bloom of youth, nothing more.  It was not that changeless beauty of structure—­that beauty, as she recognized, of the very bone, which made Mrs. Page perennially lovely.  “In ten, fifteen, at the most in twenty years, I shall have lost it all,” she thought.  “Then I shall get fat and common looking; and everything will be over for me because a little youthful colour and sparkle was all that I had.  I have nothing to hold on to—­nothing that will last.  I don’t know anything—­and yet how could I be expected to know anything after the dull life I’ve had?  In my whole life I’ve never known a woman that could help me.  I’ve had to find out everything for myself—­”

With her gaze still on the mirror, she laid the brush on its back of pink celluloid—­how much she had admired it when she bought it!—­and leaned forward with her hands clasped on the cover of the dressing-table.  Her hair still flying out from the strokes of the brush surrounded her small eager face like a cloud.  From the open neck of her kimono, embroidered in a pattern of cranes and wistaria, the thin girlish lines of her throat rose with an appealing fragility, like the stem of some delicate flower.

“I wonder if Mother could have helped me if she had lived?” she asked presently of her reflection.  “I wonder if she was different from all the other women I’ve known?” Through her mind there passed swiftly a hundred memories of her childhood.  First there came the one vivid recollection of her mother, a flashing, graceful figure, as light as thistle-down, in a skirt of spangled tulle that stood out from her knees.  The face Patty could not remember, but the spangles were indelibly impressed on her mind, the spangles and a short silver wand, with a star on the end of it, which that fairy-like figure had held over her cradle.  Of her mother this was all she had left, just this one unforgettable picture, and then a long terrible night when she had not seen her, but had heard her sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, somewhere in the darkness.  The next day, when she cried for her, they had said that she was gone, and the child had never seen her again.  In the place of her pretty mother there had been a big, rugged man, whom she had never seen before, and when she cried this man had taken her in his arms, and tried to quiet her.  Afterward, when she grew bigger and asked questions, one of the neighbours had told her that her mother had lost her mind from a fall in the circus, that they had taken her away to an asylum, and that now she was dead.