and made a pleased, deprecating noise, and pressed her daughter’s hand more firmly than she had done for the last hour.  Ellen wept, for though these things showed that her mother had been pleased by her present words, they also showed that she had been conscious of her beauty and the loss of it.  She remembered that that New Year’s Eve, seven years before, before they had gone up to bed, her mother had again held up her arm before the mirror and had sighed and said:  “They last longer than anything else about a woman, you know.  Long after all the rest of you’s old ye can keep a nice arm.  Ah, well!  Be thankful you can keep that!” and she had gone upstairs singing a parody of the Ride of the Valkyries ("Go to bed!  Go to bed!").

Of course she had hated growing old and ugly.  It must be like finding the fire going out and no more coal in the house.  And it had been done to her violently by the brute force of decay, for her structure was unalterably lovely, the bones of her face were little but perfect, the eye lay in an exquisitely-vaulted socket; and everything that could be tended into seemliness was seemly, and the fine line of her plait showed that she brushed her grey hair as if it were still red gold.  Age had simply come and passed ugliness over her, like the people in Paris that she had read about in the paper who threw vitriol over their enemies.  This was a frightening universe to live in, when the laws of nature behaved like very lawless men.  She was so young that till then she had thought there were three fixed species of people—­the young, the middle-aged, and the old—­and she had never before realised that young people must become old, or stop living.  She trembled with rage at this arbitrary rule, and sobbed to think of her dear mother undergoing this humiliation, while her free hand and a small base fraction of her mind passed selfishly over her face, asking incredulously if it must suffer the same fate.  It seemed marvellous that people could live so placidly when they knew the dreadful terms of existence, and it almost seemed as if they could not know and should be told at once so that they could arm against Providence.  She would have liked to run out into the sleeping streets and call on the citizens to wake and hear the disastrous news that beautiful women grow old and lose their beauty, and that within her knowledge this had happened to one who did not deserve it.

She raised her head and saw that the young nurse who had been coming in and out of the room all night was standing at the end of the bed and staring at her with lips pursed in disapproval.  She was shocked, Ellen perceived, because she was not keeping her eyes steadfastly on her mother, but was turning this way and that a face mobile with speculation; and for a moment she was convinced by the girl’s reproach into being ashamed because her emotion was not quite simple.  But that was nonsense; she was thinking as well as feeling about her mother, because she had loved her with the head as well as with the heart.