he herself remembered how she had looked
the night Stella Cutting was her bridesmaid. And now her color was muddy
and there were crow's feet about her eyes and deep lines from her
nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

Stella Cutting looked older herself, very considerably older. But it was
a different way of looking older. She had grown stout and her face was
too full. But she did not look _pulled_ at like this. As she talked of
her children hers was the face of a woman normally, contentedly growing
older. The woman sitting before the mirror bitterly turned away now from
that reflection of dissatisfaction with emptiness.

It was that boy had done it! she thought with a new rise of resentment.
She had been able to go along very evenly until he impertinently came
into her house and rudely and stupidly broke through the things she had
carefully builded up around herself. Ever since he had plunged into
things even she herself had been careful not to break into, there had
been this inner turmoil that was giving her the look of an old woman. If
Stella Cutting had come just a few months earlier she could not have had
so much to say about how terribly Marion Averley had changed.

Why was she so absurd as to let herself be upset? she angrily asked of
herself, beginning to unfasten the dress she was wearing that she might
get into something loose and try to relax. A hook caught in some lace
and in her vexation at not being able at once to unfasten it she gave it
a jerk that tore the lace. She bit her lips and could have cried. Those
were the things she did these days!--since that boy came and
blunderingly broke into guarded places.

She sat in a low, deep chair before the open fire that burned in the
sitting-room adjoining her bedroom. It was the room that had been her
husband's. After he went away she took it for an upstairs
sitting-room--a part of her program of unconcern. As she sank down into
the gracious chair she told herself that she would rest for that
evening, not think about things. But not to think about things was
impossible that night. Stella Cutting had brought old things near and
made them newly real: her girlhood, her falling in love with Stuart
Williams, her wedding. Those reminiscences caught her and swept her on
to other things. She thought of her marriage; thought of things that,
ever since that boy came and made her know how insecure she really was
in the defences she had put up for herself, it had been a