able content of a Caroline Briggs!

At moments she felt enraged.

She saw the crowds passing in the streets, women tripping along
consciously, men--flaneurs--strolling with their well-known look of
watchful idleness, and she felt herself to be one of life's prisoners.
And she knew she would never again take hands with the Paris she had
once known so well. Why was that? Because of something in herself,
something irrevocable which had fixed itself in her with the years. She
was changing, had changed, not merely in body, but in something else.
She felt that her audacity was sinking under the influence of her
diffidence. Suddenly it occurred to her that perhaps this sudden visit
to Paris on the track of an adventure was the last strong effort of her
audacity. How would it end? In a meek and ridiculous return to London
after a lunch with Caroline Briggs, a dinner with Caroline, a visit
to the Opera Comique with Caroline! That really seemed the probable
conclusion of the whole business. And yet--and yet she still had a sort
of queer under feeling that she was drawing near to a climax in her
life, and that, when she did return to London, she would return a
definitely changed woman.

At half-past eight that night she walked into Caroline's wonderful house
in the Champs-Elysees.

During dinner the two women talked as any two women of their types might
have talked, quite noncommittally, although, in a surface way, quite
intimately. Miss Briggs was a creature full of tact, and was the last
person in the world to try to force a confidence from anyone. She was
also not given at any time to pouring out confidences of her own.

After dinner they sat in a little room which Miss Briggs had had
conveyed from Persia to Paris. Everything in it was Persian. When the
door by which it was entered had been shut there was absolutely nothing
to suggest Europe to those within. A faint Eastern perfume pervaded
this strange little room, which suggested a deep retirement, an almost
cloistered seclusion. A grille in one of the walls drew the imagination
towards the harem. It seemed that there must be hidden women over
there beyond it. Instinctively one listened for the tinkle of childish
laughter, for the distant plash of a fountain, for the shuffle of
slippers on marble.

Lady Sellingworth admired this room, and envied her friend for
possessing it. But that night it brought to her a thought which she
could not help expressing.

"Aren't you