up her skirts and set her feet waggishly twinkling in a burlesque dance, which she followed up with a travesty of an opera, a form of art she had met with in her youth and about which, since she was the kind of woman who could have written songs and ballads if she had lived in the age when wood fires and general plenty made the hearth a home for poetry, she could be passionately witty as artists are about work that springs from aesthetic principles different from their own.  It had been a lovely performance.  They had ended in a tempest of laughter, which had been brought to a sudden check when they had looked at the clock and seen that it was actually twenty-five to one, which was somehow so much worse than half-past twelve!  It was that moment that had been recalled to Ellen by the sudden interruption of the pulses of the night by the nurses’ laughter.  That had been a beautiful party.

She would never be at another, and looked down lovingly on her mother’s face, and was horrified by its extreme ugliness.  There was no longer any gallant Tom Thumb wit strutting about her eyes and mouth, no little tender cheeping voice to distract the attention from the hideous ruin time had worked in her.  Age diffused through her substance, spoiling every atom, attacking its contribution to the scheme of form and colour.  It had pitted her skin with round pores and made lie from nose to mouth thick folds such as coarse and valueless material might fall into, and on her lids it was puckered like silk on the lid of a workbox; but if she had opened them they would only have shown whites that had gone yellow and were reticulated with tiny veins.  It had turned her nose into a beak and had set about the nostrils little red tendril-like lines.  Her lips were fissured with purple cracks and showed a few tall, narrow teeth standing on the pale gleaming gum like sea-eroded rocks when the tide is out.  The tendons of her neck were like thick, taut string, and the loose arras of flesh that hung between them would not be nice to kiss, even though one loved her so much.

Really she was very ugly, and it was dreadful, for she had been very beautiful.  Always at those tea-parties to which people were invited whom Ellen had known all her life from her mother’s anecdotes as spirited girls of her own age, but which nobody came to except middle-aged women in shabby mantles, though all the invitations were accepted, someone was sure to say:  “You know, my dear, your mother was far the prettiest girl in Edinburgh.  Oh, Christina, you were!...”  It was true, too, a French artist who had come to Scotland to decorate Lord Rosebery’s ballroom at Dalmeny had pestered Mrs. Melville to sit to him, and had painted a portrait of her which had been bought by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  Ellen had never had a clear idea of what the picture was like, for though she had often asked her mother, she had never got anything more out of her than a vexed, deprecating murmur:  “Och,