There was a long silence.  Joan felt the tears trickling between her fingers.

“You haven’t seen me,” came at last in a thin, broken voice.

Joan bent down and kissed her.  “Let’s try it,” she whispered.

A little choking sound was the only answer.  But the woman rose and, Joan following, they stole upstairs into the bedroom and Mrs. Phillips turned the key.

It took a long time, and Joan, seated on the bed, remembered a night when she had taken a trapped mouse (if only he had been a quiet mouse!) into the bathroom and had waited while it drowned.  It was finished at last, and Mrs Phillips stood revealed with her hair down, showing streaks of dingy brown.

Joan tried to enthuse; but the words came haltingly.  She suggested to Joan a candle that some wind had suddenly blown out.  The paint and powder had been obvious, but at least it had given her the mask of youth.  She looked old and withered.  The life seemed to have gone out of her.

“You see, dear, I began when I was young,” she explained; “and he has always seen me the same.  I don’t think I could live like this.”

The painted doll that the child fancied! the paint washed off and the golden hair all turned to drab?  Could one be sure of “getting used to it,” of “liking it better?” And the poor bewildered doll itself!  How could one expect to make of it a statue:  “The Woman of the People.”  One could only bruise it.

It ended in Joan’s promising to introduce her to discreet theatrical friends who would tell her of cosmetics less injurious to the skin, and advise her generally in the ancient and proper art of “making up.”

It was not the end she had looked for.  Joan sighed as she closed her door behind her.  What was the meaning of it?  On the one hand that unimpeachable law, the greatest happiness of the greatest number; the sacred cause of Democracy; the moral Uplift of the people; Sanity, Wisdom, Truth, the higher Justice; all the forces on which she was relying for the regeneration of the world—­all arrayed in stern demand that the flabby, useless Mrs. Phillips should be sacrificed for the general good.  Only one voice had pleaded for foolish, helpless Mrs. Phillips—­and had conquered.  The still, small voice of Pity.

CHAPTER X

Arthur sprang himself upon her a little before Christmas.  He was full of a great project.  It was that she and her father should spend Christmas with his people at Birmingham.  Her father thought he would like to see his brother; they had not often met of late, and Birmingham would be nearer for her than Liverpool.