, which never quite abandoned her, which her vanity was
never able to destroy. Although her vanity was colossal, she usually
either concealed it, or if she showed it showed it subtly. She was not
of the type which cannot pass a mirror in a restaurant without staring
into it. She only looked into mirrors in private. Nor was she one of
those women who powder their faces and rouge their lips before men in
public places. It was impossible for her to be blatant. Nevertheless,
her moral disease led her gradually to fall from her own secret standard
of what a woman of her world should be. Craven had once said to himself
that Lady Sellingworth could never seek the backstairs. He was not
wholly right in this surmise about her. There was a time in her
life--the time when she was, or was called, a professional beauty--when
she could scarcely see a man's face without watching it for admiration.
Although she preserved her delightfully unselfconscious manner she was
almost ceaselessly conscious of self. Her own beauty was the idol which
she worshipped and which she presented to the world expectant of the
worship of others. There have been many women like her, but few who have
been so clever in hiding their disease. But always seated in her brain
there was an imp who understood, was contemptuous and mocked, an imp who
knew what was coming to her, what comes to all the daughters of men who
outlive youth and its shadowy triumphs. Her brain was ironic, while her
temperament was passionate, and greedy in its pursuit of the food it
clamoured for; her brain watched the unceasing chase with almost a
bitterness of sarcasm, merging sometimes into a bitterness of pity. In
some women there seems at times to be a dual personality, a woman of
the blood at odds with a woman of the grey matter. It was so in Lady
Sellingworth's case, but for a long time the former woman dominated the
latter, whose empire was to come later with white hair and a ravaged
face.

At the age of thirty-five, after some years of brilliant and even of
despotic widowhood, she married again--Lord Sellingworth.

He was twenty-five years older than she was, ruggedly handsome, huge,
lean, self-possessed, very clever, very worldly, and that unusual
phenomenon, a genuine atheist. There was no doubt that he had a keen
passion for her, one of those passions which sometimes flare up in a man
of a strong and impetuous nature, who has lived too much, who is
worn out, haunted at times by