Surrounding her were women whose white hands, jewelled and unjewelled, played about their business, lovely as pale and delicate flowers.  She cast her glances right and left, seeing them and envying.  And she looked at their clothes, their smart and slender shoes, the richness of their cloaks hanging over chair backs, and she saw her own frock as it was, dyed and mended and demode.

She knew.  “It looked nice when I tried it on at home because there were no comparisons.  Here, where there’s competition, I—­I’m hopeless.  I’d better have worn a suit.”

Her turban, that thing which had paraded so saucily in the pink room while the babies slept regardless, was an outsider—­a gamin among hats.

She was not the first woman who has decked herself at home to her own gratification, to emerge into a wealthier world to her own despair.

While these things were borne in, with the flashlight speed of woman’s impressions, upon her brain, the first course arrived and they ate.  After it, Osborn roused himself to talk.  He asked her several times if she were enjoying herself, and she told him with smiling lips that she was.

“It’s not so often that we go out, is it?” he remarked.  “We must make the best of the times we get.”

“This is lovely.”

“Poor old girl!” said Osborn, “you don’t get out on the loose very much, do you?  But I don’t suppose you want to, though; women are different from men.  A woman’s interest centres in her home, and you’ve quite enough to do to keep your mind occupied, haven’t you?”

“And my hands.  Look at them!”

She spread them before him.

“Poor old girl!” said Osborn, looking.

A recollection stirred in him, too, of what those hands had been in the days of their romance.  “You used to have the prettiest hands I ever saw,” he said.

She snatched them petulantly under the table again.

“Don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t—­say that!  I can’t bear to think how ugly I’m getting.”

Her husband looked at her with a faint, bewildered smile.  “Come!” he adjured her, “you mustn’t get morbid.  You’re not ugly, you silly girl.  You were one of the prettiest girls I ever saw.”

“But now?”

“Now?” He looked at her quickly.  “You’re as pretty as ever you were, of course.”

“I’m not,” she denied, reading the lie in his eyes.

“Women are bound to change, no doubt,” he conceded.  “I daresay having the babies aged you a bit.  But you needn’t get anxious about your looks yet.”

“I’m not thirty, but I look it.”

“No, no, you don’t,” he said constrainedly.

She smiled, and contented herself with watching him eat the next course while she toyed with it.  As a woman, food meant little to her; she was concerned more with the prettiness of its serving; but Osborn was avidly hungry and his enjoyment was palpable.