as you call it," she said at length.
"After all, you're honest with yourself, that's the chief thing. I admit
if you go on being dishonest with others in time it has a deadly
tendency to react on yourself and blur your vision, as it did with
Blanche, but then she was crooked anyway. I shouldn't worry about myself
if I were you, Georgie!"

"Well, it deceived Val, I suppose," remarked Georgie.

"Not about anything vital. He loved you already, and you were to find
you loved him. Besides ... with men ... it's not quite the same
thing...."

Georgie stared at her in round-eyed silence for a moment, struck by a
weary something that was no more old than young, that was eternal, in
Judith's voice. Suddenly the elder girl seemed so much woman as she lay
there--the everlasting feminine, the secret store of the knowledge of
the ages.... Georgie, for all she was newly engaged, felt somehow like a
little girl. Judith's long half-closed eyes met hers, but with no frank
giving in their depths at the moment. She was withdrawn and Georgie felt
it.

"Well, I must get up," said Judith suddenly. "Clear out and see if you
can hurry Mrs. Penticost over breakfast."

Georgie went, and Judith slipped out of bed, and going to the window,
examined her face in the clear morning light, lifting her hand-glass at
many angles.

After her bath she took up the glass again and began with infinite care
to rub in first rouge and then powder. Gradually she became a less
haggard-looking creature and the years seemed to fall away. When she
had done she examined herself anxiously. The dread that her eye would
get "out," as Blanche's had, was upon her.

Relieved by the scrutiny, she stepped into a soft rose cashmere frock
and buttoned up the long, close-fitting bodice, settled the little
ruffle at the throat, and adjusted with deft fingers the perky folds of
the bustle. "Making-up makes one look so much better that it makes one
feel better," she reflected. She took a final look at herself in the
dimpled glass that gave back her figure in a series of waves and angles,
and suddenly she gave a little half-rueful laugh. She was comparing
herself with the slangy fresh girl downstairs, that product of the new
decade, so different from the generation born only ten years before her.
Judith had spoken to this wholesome, adorably _gauche_ young creature of
truth, while, to maintain the thing that stood to her for light and food
and truth itself, she had, amongst