have the prettiest hands I
ever saw," he said.

She snatched them petulantly under the table again.

"Don't!"

"Don't what?"

"Don't--say that! I can't bear to think how ugly I'm getting."

Her husband looked at her with a faint, bewildered smile. "Come!" he
adjured her, "you mustn't get morbid. You're not ugly, you silly girl.
You were one of the prettiest girls I ever saw."

"But _now_?"

"Now?" He looked at her quickly. "You're as pretty as ever you were,
of course."

"I'm not," she denied, reading the lie in his eyes.

"Women are bound to change, no doubt," he conceded. "I daresay having
the babies aged you a bit. But you needn't get anxious about your
looks _yet_."

"I'm not thirty, but I look it."

"No, no, you don't," he said constrainedly.

She smiled, and contented herself with watching him eat the next
course while she toyed with it. As a woman, food meant little to her;
she was concerned more with the prettiness of its serving; but Osborn
was avidly hungry and his enjoyment was palpable.

She thought: "Poor boy! How he likes the good things of life! And how
few of them he gets! He oughtn't to have married."

She looked around her again, and saw, a little way across the floor, a
gay woman in black. Her hair and eyes were black, her complexion was
white, her lips were red. She had with her two men who worshipped. Of
her Marie said to herself:

"She's older than I, but she's keeping her looks; her hands are not so
nice as mine used to be, but now they're far nicer. She's keeping
herself young and gay; she sees to it that she's pampered. But if she
had married a poor man, and had two babies, and had been obliged to do
all the chores, I wonder...."

"What interests you, my dear?" Osborn asked.

She told him in a fitful, inarticulate way. "I was looking at that
woman over there, the one in black, with the diamond comb in her hair.
And--and I was wondering--in a way--I can hardly explain--what is
really the best thing to do with one's life. She's older than I--a
good deal older--but see how smooth her face is. She looks as if she
could never do anything other than laugh. And her hands--see, she uses
them to show them off--aren't they lovely? But I was wondering, if she
was in my shoes, how would she look? What would she do if babies woke
her up half a dozen times every night, so that when the morning came
she was very tired?

"Tired, and yet she must get up and cook and sweep, and take the