“Your step-sisters are at least respectable,” Miss Bunce answered.

“Let us grant that to be a merit,” retorted Joanna:  “Do I understand you to claim the credit of it?”

“They are very clean, though,” she went on, looking from one to the other, “and well preserved.  Susan, I notice, shows signs of failing; she has dropped her spectacles into the teacup.  But to what end, Miss—­”

“Bunce.”

“To what end, Miss Bunce, are you preserving them?”

“Madam, when you entered the room I was of your way of thinking.  Book after book that I read”—­Miss Bunce blushed at this point—­ “has displayed before me the delights of that quick artistic life that you glory in following.  I have eaten out my heart in longing.  But now that I see how it coarsens a women—­for it is coarse to sneer at age, in spite of all you may say about uselessness being no better for being protracted over much time—­”

“You are partly right,” Joanna interrupted, “although you mistake the accident for the essence.  I am only coarse when confronted by respectability.  Nevertheless, I am glad if I reconcile you to your lot.”

“But the point is,” insisted Miss Bunce, “that a lady never forgets herself.”

“And you would argue that the being liable to forget myself is only another development of that very character by virtue of which I follow Art.  Ah, well”—­she nodded towards her stepsisters—­” I ask you why they and I should be daughters of one father?”

She rose and stepped to the piano in the corner.  It was a tall Collard, shaped, above the key-board, like a cupboard.  After touching the notes softly, to be sure they were in tune, she drew over a chair, and fell to playing Schumann’s “Warum?” very tenderly.  It was a tinkling instrument, but perhaps her playing gained pathos thereby, before such an audience.  At the end she turned round:  there were tears in her eyes.

“You used to play the ‘Osborne Quadrilles’ very nicely,” observed Miss Susan, suddenly.  “Your playing has become very—­very—­”

“Disreputable,” suggested Joanna.

“Well, not exactly.  I was going to say ‘unintelligible.’”

“It’s the same thing.”  She rose, kissed her step-sisters, and walked out of the room without a look at Miss Bunce.

“Poor Joanna!” observed Miss Susan, after a minute’s silence.  “She has aged very much.  I really must begin to think of my end.”

Outside, in the street, Joanna’s husband was waiting for her—­a dark, ragged man, with a five-act expression of face.

“Don’t talk to me for a while,” she begged.  “I have been among ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“They were much too dull to be real:  and yet—­Oh, Jack, I feel glad for the first time that our child was taken!  I might have left him there.”

“What shall we sing?” asked the man, turning his face away.