“I should think it would make it pleasanter for the men to work in the factory, when it looks so pretty and green,” she told her husband one of the hottest days of the preceding summer.  As she spoke she compressed her lips in a way which was becoming habitual to her.  It meant the endurance of a sharp stab of vital pain.  There was a terrible pathos in the poor woman’s appearance at that time.  She still kept about.  Her malady did not seem to be on the increase, but it endured.  Her form had changed indescribably.  She had not lost flesh, but she had a curious, distorted look, and one on seeing her had a bewildered feeling, and looked again to be sure that he had seen aright.  Her ghastly pallor she concealed in a manner which she thought distinctly sinful.  She painted and powdered.  She did not dare purchase openly the concoctions which were used for improving her complexion, but she went to a manicure and invested in a colored salve for her finger-nails.  This, with rather surprising skill for such a conscience-pricked tyro, she applied to the pale curves of her cheeks and her blue lips.  She took more pains than ever before with her dress, and it was all to deceive her husband, that he should not be annoyed.  She felt a desperate shame because of her illness; she felt it to be a direct personal injury to this masculine power which had been set over her gentle femininity.  It was not so much because she was afraid of losing his affection that she concealed her affliction from him, as because she felt that the affliction itself was somehow an act of disloyalty.  Her terrible malady had in a way affected her reasoning powers, so that they had become distorted by a monstrous growth of suffering, like her body.  She would not give up going about as usual, and was never absent from church.  She drove about with her husband in his smart trap.  Twice she had gone with Robert to consult the New York specialist, taking times when Norman was away on business.  She still would not consent to an operation, and lately the specialist had been lukewarm in advising it.  He had indeed been doubtful from the first.

Mrs. Lloyd treated Robert with a soft affection which was almost like that of a mother.  One night, when he returned late from a call on Ellen, she sat up waiting for him.  He had not called on Ellen before for several months, and it was nearly midnight when he returned.

“Why, Aunt Lizzie, are you up?” he cried, as he entered the library door and saw his aunt’s figure, clad in shining black satin, gleaming with jet, in the depths of an easy-chair.

Mrs. Lloyd looked up at him with an expression of patient suffering.  “I couldn’t go to sleep if I went to bed, Robert,” she replied, in a hushed voice.  She found it a comfort sometimes to confess her pain to him.  Robert went over to her, and drew her large, crinkled, blond head to his shoulder as if she had been a child.

“Poor thing,” he whispered, stroking her face pitifully.  “Is it very terrible?” he asked, with his lips close to her ear.