Yet when she was dressed—­in pure white, with only a string of pearls, the smallest she had, round her neck—­she was like that white flower which had been placed on her pillow last night.

Turning to leave the bedroom she caught sight of her face and figure again in the big mirror, and she seemed to herself like some other woman.  There was that strange, distant look of agony in her eyes, that transfiguring look in the face; there was the figure somehow gone slimmer in these few hours; and there was a frail appearance which did not belong to her.

As she was about to leave the room to descend the stairs, there came a knock at the door.  A bunch of white violets was handed in, with a pencilled note in Rudyard’s handwriting.

White violets—­white violets!

The note read, “Wear these to-night, Jasmine.”

White violets—­how strange that he should send them!  These they send for the young, the innocent, and the dead.  Rudyard had sent them to her—­from how far away!  He was there just across the hallway, and yet he might have been in Bolivia, so far as their real life was concerned.

She was under no illusion.  This day, and perhaps a few, a very few others, must be lived under the same roof, in order that they could separate without scandal; but things could never go on as in the past.  She had realized that the night before, when still that chance of which she had spoken to Stafford was hers; when she had wound the coil of her wonderful hair round her throat, and had imagined that self-destruction which has tempted so many of more spiritual make than herself.  It was melodramatic, emotional, theatrical, maybe; but the emotional, the theatrical, the egotistic mortal has his or her tragedy, which is just as real as that which comes to those of more spiritual vein, just as real as that which comes to the more classical victim of fate.  Jasmine had the deep defects of her qualities.  Her suffering was not the less acute because it found its way out with impassioned demonstration.

There was, however, no melodrama in the quiet trembling with which she took the white violets, the symbol of love and death.  She was sure that Rudyard was not aware of their significance and meaning, but that did not modify the effect upon her.  Her trouble just now was too deep for tears, too bitter for words, too terrible for aught save numb endurance.  Nothing seemed to matter in a sense, and yet the little routine of life meant so much in its iron insistence.  The habits of convention are so powerful that life’s great issues are often obscured by them.  Going to her final doom a woman would stop to give the last careful touch to her hair—­the mechanical obedience to long habit.  It is not vanity, not littleness, but habit; never shown with subtler irony than in the case of Madame de Langrois, who, pacing the path to her execution at Lille, stooped, picked up a pin from the ground, and fastened it in her gown—­the tyranny of habit.