ught Time. And sometimes the weariness and the nausea of battle lay
heavy upon her. Her expression began to change. She never lost, she
never could lose, her distinction, but it was slightly blurred, slightly
tarnished. She preserved the appearance of bonhomie, but her cordiality,
her good nature, were not what they had been. Formerly she had had
marvellous spirits; now she was often accompanied into the world by the
black dog. And when she was alone he sat by the hearth with her.

She began to hate being a widow. Sometimes she thought that she wished
she had had children. But then it occurred to her that they might have
been daughters, lovely girls now perhaps, showing to society what she
had once been. With such daughters she would surely have been forced
into abdication. For she knew that she could never have entered into a
contest with her own children. Perhaps it was best as it was, best that
she was childless.

She might no doubt have married a third time. Sir Seymour Portman, a
bachelor for her sake, would have asked nothing better than to become
her husband. And there were other middle-aged and old men who would
gladly have linked themselves with her, and who did not scruple to
tell her so. But now she could not bear the idea of making a "suitable"
match. Lord Sellingworth had been old, and she had been happy with him.
But she had felt, and had considered herself to be, young when she had
married him. The contrast between him and herself had been flattering to
her vanity. It would be different now. And besides, with the coming of
middle age, and the fatal fading of physical attraction, there had come
into her a painful obsession.

As much as she hated youth in women she was attracted by it in men. She
began secretly to worship youth as it showed itself in the other sex.
Something in her clamoured for the admiration and the longing of the
young men who were amorous of life, who were comparatively new to the
fray, who had the ardour and the freshness which could have mated with
hers when she was a girl, but which now contrasted violently with her
terribly complete experience and growing morbidity. She felt that now
she could never marry a man of her own age or older than herself, not
simply because she could not love such a man, but because she would be
perpetually in danger of loving a man of quite another type.

She entered upon a very ugly period, perhaps the ugliest there can be in
the secret life of a woma