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n, looking from one to the other, "and well preserved. Susan, I notice, shows signs of failing; she has dropped her spectacles into the teacup. But to what end, Miss--" "Bunce." "To what end, Miss Bunce, are you preserving them?" "Madam, when you entered the room I was of your way of thinking. Book after book that I read"--Miss Bunce blushed at this point-- "has displayed before me the delights of that quick artistic life that you glory in following. I have eaten out my heart in longing. But now that I see how it coarsens a women--for it _is_ coarse to sneer at age, in spite of all you may say about uselessness being no better for being protracted over much time--" "You are partly right," Joanna interrupted, "although you mistake the accident for the essence. I am only coarse when confronted by respectability. Nevertheless, I am glad if I reconcile you to your lot." "But the point is," insisted Miss Bunce, "that a lady _never_ forgets herself." "And you would argue that the being liable to forget myself is only another development of that very character by virtue of which I follow Art. Ah, well"--she nodded towards her stepsisters--"I ask you why they and I should be daughters of one father?" She rose and stepped to the piano in the corner. It was a tall Collard, shaped, above the key-board, like a cupboard. After touching the notes softly, to be sure they were in tune, she drew over a chair, and fell to playing Schumann's "_Warum?_" very tenderly. It was a tinkling instrument, but perhaps her playing gained pathos thereby, before such an audience. At the end she turned round: there were tears in her eyes. "You used to play the 'Osborne Quadrilles' very nicely," observed Miss Susan, suddenly. "Your playing has become very--very--" "Disreputable," suggested Joanna. "Well, not exactly. I was going to say 'unintelligible.'" "It's the same thing." She rose, kissed her step-sisters, and walked out of the room without a look at Miss Bunce. "Poor Joanna!" observed Miss Susan, after a minute's silence. "She has aged very much. I really must begin to think of my end." Outside, in the street, Joanna's husband was waiting for her--a dark, ragged man, with a five-act expression of face. "Don't talk to me for a while," she begged. "I have been among ghosts." "Ghosts?" "They were much too dull to be real: and yet--Oh, Jack, I feel glad for the first time that our child was taken
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