it; made it by sheer force of contrast
more hopeless and more horrible than it really was. An illustrated book
of the fashions, in which women were represented exhibiting their finery
by means of the free use of their limbs, lay on the bed, from which she
had not moved for years without being lifted by her nurse. A hand-glass
was placed with the book so that she could reach it easily. She took up
the glass after her attendant had left the room, and looked at her face
with an unblushing interest and attention which she would have been
ashamed of herself at the age of eighteen.

"Older and older, and thinner and thinner!" she said. "The major will
soon be a free man; but I'll have that red-haired hussy out of the house
first!"

She dropped the looking-glass on the counterpane, and clinched the hand
that held it. Her eyes suddenly riveted themselves on a little crayon
portrait of her husband hanging on the opposite wall; they looked at
the likeness with the hard and cruel brightness of the eyes of a bird
of prey. "Red is your taste in your old age is it?" she said to the
portrait. "Red hair, and a scrofulous complexion, and a padded figure,
a ballet-girl's walk, and a pickpocket's light fingers. _Miss_ Gwilt!
_Miss_, with those eyes, and that walk!" She turned her head suddenly
on the pillow, and burst into a harsh, jeering laugh. "_Miss_!" she
repeated over and over again, with the venomously pointed emphasis of
the most merciless of all human forms of contempt--the contempt of one
woman for another.

The age we live in is an age which finds no human creature inexcusable.
Is there an excuse for Mrs. Milroy? Let the story of her life answer the
question.

She had married the major at an unusually early age; and, in marrying
him, had taken a man for her husband who was old enough to be her
father--a man who, at that time, had the reputation, and not unjustly,
of having made the freest use of his social gifts and his advantages of
personal appearance in the society of women. Indifferently educated, and
below her husband in station, she had begun by accepting his addresses
under the influence of her own flattered vanity, and had ended by
feeling the fascination which Major Milroy had exercised over women
infinitely her mental superiors in his earlier life. He had been
touched, on his side, by her devotion, and had felt, in his turn, the
attraction of her beauty, her freshness, and her youth. Up to the time
when their lit