wearier.

She uttered charming things of madame's white hands. And, surely, she
had never had the pleasure of seeing madame there before?

Madame replied: "No; you have never seen me here before."

She reflected: "It's very true, that. No one had ever seen me, this
me, a year ago."

Just as she had felt no hate for the women in the Royal Red, so her
sense of hostility to the girl bending over her hand had vanished. She
was a friendly rival, not to be feared. And she was not so peerless,
after all; there were flaws under the powder with which she coated her
pale skin.

"I have never seen prettier nails, madame," said the manicurist, as
she smeared on cream.

After she left the Beauty Parlour Marie had nowhere to go. There was
no Rokeby to give her tea in his comfortable office while he offered
her business advice; he had been very good with his advice over the
question of Marie's inheritance. Neither was there a Julia to ring up
and invite to tea at one of the numberless cosy teashops of the West
End. Marie turned in, at three o'clock, to a matinee and bought an
upper circle seat, a few minutes late for the rise of the curtain on
the first act of an ultra-modern play.

The play was all about marriage. It dissected marriage into a thousand
pieces, and held every piece which was not turned into tragedy up to
ridicule. It fostered all the nonsense which fretted in idle women's
hearts, and touched many sore spots in others; and made men smile
cynically as if saying, "That's got it to the life." This play kept
Marie Kerr enchained; it set her wondering why the Marriage Service
had ever been written and consecrated; it blew to and fro the winds of
the storm in her soul until a tempest rocked her mind; she drew a
black comparison between the tragedy of the hero and heroine, and the
situation between Osborn and herself. But at last, when the playwright
had ridiculed and denounced what he called the oldest and tiredest
convention in the world for long enough, the play seemed to turn on a
pivot, and the pivot was the cradle. The playwright gave the playgoers
the happy ending for which the world craves and sent them home
relieved.

He sent Marie Kerr home relieved, too; but the day had not changed her
mind. She was fixed and, she felt, irrevocably. Over her solitary
dinner she thought of the play; and she thought of the fight to be
fought in her own home, and she slept upon it, to awake unmoved in the
morning.

She did