owledge of those hidden white hairs haunted her. She felt horribly
ashamed of them. She hated them with an intense, and almost despairing,
hatred. For they stamped the terrific difference between her body and
her nature.

It seemed to her that in her nature she retained all the passions of
youth. This was not strictly true, for no woman over forty has precisely
the same passions as an ardent girl, however ardent she may be. But the
"wild heart," spoken of by Lady Sellingworth to Craven, still beat in
her breast, and the vanity of the girl, enormously increased by the
passage of the years, still lived intensely in the middle-aged woman.
It was perhaps this natural wildness combined with her vanity which
tortured Lady Sellingworth most at this period of her life. She still
desired happiness and pleasure greedily, indeed with almost unnatural
greediness; she still felt that life robbed of the admiration and the
longing of men would not be worth living.

Beryl Van Tuyn had spoken of a photograph of Lady Sellingworth taken
when she was about forty-nine, and had said that, though very handsome,
it showed a _fausse jeunesse_, and revealed a woman looking vain and
imperious, a woman with the expression of one always on the watch for
new lovers. And there had been a cruel truth in her words. For, from the
time when she had given herself to artificiality until the time, some
nine years later, when she had plunged into what had seemed to her,
and to many others, something very like old age, Lady Sellingworth had
definitely and continuously deteriorated, as all those do who try
to defy any natural process. Carrying on a fight in which there is
a possibility of winning may not do serious harm to a character, but
carrying on a fight which must inevitably be lost always hardens and
embitters the combatant. During those years of her _fausse jeunesse_
Lady Sellingworth was at her worst.

For one thing she became the victim of jealousy. She was secretly
jealous of good-looking young women, and, spreading her evil wide like a
cloud, she was even jealous of youth. To be young was to possess a
gift which she had lost, and a gift which men love as they love but few
things. She could not help secretly hating the possessors of it.

She had now become enrolled in the "old guard," and had adopted as her
device their motto, "Never give up." She was one of the more or less
mysterious fighters of London. She fought youth incessantly, and she
fo