ho was the truth, at _herself_. This woman
before her was only a counterfeit, a marvellously clever artificiality.

There were two electric lights at the sides of the mirror. She turned
them both on. She wanted crude light just then. Cruelty she was taking
to her bosom. She was grasping her nettle with both hands.

Yes, the artificiality was marvellously clever! The Greek had been worth
his money. He had created a sort of human orchid whose petals showed
few, wonderfully few, signs of withering.

But she had wanted to be not the orchid but really the rose. And so she
was down in the dust.

Poor old Adela Sellingworth, who in a very short time--how long exactly
would the Greek's work take to crumble--would look even older than
fifty!

She turned out the lights presently and got into bed. When she had made
the big bedroom dark, and had stretched her long body out between the
sheets of Irish linen, she felt terrifically tired, tired in body and
spirit, but somehow not in mind. Her mind was almost horribly alive and
full of agility. It brought visions before her; it brought voices into
her ears.

She saw men of the underworld sitting together in shadows and whispering
about her, using coarse words, undressing her character, commenting
upon it without mercy, planning how they would make use of it to their
advantage. She heard them laughing about her and about all the women
like her.

And presently she saw an old woman with a white face, a withered throat
and vague eyes, an old woman in a black wig, smiling as she decked
herself out in the Sellingworth jewels.

PART THREE

CHAPTER I

Miss Van Tuyn, enthroned among distinguished and definite Georgians in a
nimbus of smoke, presently began to wonder what had become of a certain
young man. Despite the clamour of voices about her, and the necessity
for showing incessantly that, although she had never bothered to paint
cubist pictures or to write minor poetry, or even to criticize and
appreciate meticulously those who did, she was cleverer than any
Georgian of them all, her mind would slip away to Berkeley Square. She
had, of course, noted young Craven's tacit resistance to the pressure
of her desire, and her girlish vanity had resented it. But she had
remembered that even in these active days of the ruthless development of
the ego a sense of politeness, of what is "due" from one human being
to another, still lingers in some perhaps old-fashioned bosoms. Lad