icured fingers fretted for a moment with the
counterpane.

"Ah, who will write the tragedy of us women who were 'famous Southern
beauties' once? We were queens of men while our youth lasted, and
diarists still prattle charmingly concerning us. But nothing was
expected of us save to be beautiful and to condescend to be made much
of, and that is our tragedy. For very few things, my dear, are more
pitiable than the middle-age of the pitiful butterfly woman, whose mind
cannot--cannot, because of its very nature--reach to anything higher!
Middle-age strips her of everything--the admiration, the flattery, the
shallow merriment--all the little things that her little mind longs
for--and other women take her place, in spite of her futile, pitiful
efforts to remain young. And the world goes on as before, and there is a
whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly
superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she
is old--ah, so old!--under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty
fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy
this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a
note of earnestness in her voice.

"Such a woman," said Patricia, with distinctness, "deserves no pity."

"Well," Mrs. Pendomer conceded, drily, "she doesn't get it. Probably,
because she always grows fat, from sheer lack of will-power to resist
sloth and gluttony--the only agreeable vices left her; and by no stretch
of the imagination can a fat woman be converted into either a pleasing
or heroic figure."

Mrs. Pendomer paused for a breathing-space, and smiled, though not very
pleasantly.

"It is, doubtless," said she, "a sight for gods--and quite certainly for
men--to laugh at, this silly woman striving to regain a vanished
frugality of waist. Yes, I suppose it is amusing--but it is also
pitiful. And it is more pitiful still if she has ever loved a man in the
unreasoning way these shallow women sometimes do. Men age so slowly; the
men a girl first knows are young long after she has reached
middle-age--yes, they go on dancing cotillions and talking nonsense in
the garden, long after she has taken to common-sense shoes. And the man
is still young--and he cares for some other woman, who is young and has
all that she has lost--and it seems so unfair!" said Mrs. Pendomer.

Patricia regarded her for a moment. The purple eyes were alert, their
glance was hard. "You seem