f I could be different--that I would turn into
a mere bond-slave to my body? Why, a day labourer has rest, but I
haven't. There's not a moment when I'm not doing something for my
beauty, or planning effects, or undergoing a treatment. I never sleep as
I want to, nor bathe as I want to, nor even eat what I like. It's all
somebody's system for preserving something about me. I've lived on
celery and apples to keep from growing fat and taken daily massage to
keep from getting thin--and yet I never wake up in the morning that I
don't turn sick for fear I'll discover my first wrinkle in the glass.
Now imagine," she finished with a cynical laugh, "Perry going upon a
diet for any sentimental reasons, or sacrificing terrapin in order to
retain my affection!"

"I can't," confessed Laura bluntly, "it's beyond me, but I wish you
wouldn't. I wish you'd try to hold him by something different--something
higher."

"You can't hold a person by what he hasn't got," returned Gerty with the
flippant ridicule she so desperately clung to--a ridicule which she used
as unsparingly upon herself as upon her husband. Then, after a pause,
she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner.
"A wrinkle would kill me," she pursued; "I'd rather endure any
agony--I'd be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about.
Yet they must come--they're obliged to come in fifteen--ten--perhaps in
five years. Perhaps even to-morrow. Do you suppose," she questioned
abruptly, with a tragic intensity worthy of a less ignoble cause, "that
when one gets old one really ceases to mind--that one dies out all
inside--the sensations I mean, and the emotions--before the husk begins
to wither?" She paused a moment, but as Laura continued to regard her
with a soft, compassionate look she turned away again and, touching an
electric button in the wall, flooded the room with light. The change was
so startling that every object seemed to leap at once from twilight
vagueness into a conspicuous prominence. On a chair in the corner was
carelessly flung a white chiffon dinner gown, and a pair of little satin
slippers had been thrown upon the floor beside it, where they lay
slightly sideways, with turned-out toes, as they had fallen from the
wearer's feet. The pathos which seems so often to dwell in trifling
inanimate objects spoke to Laura from the little discarded shoes, and
again society appeared to her as a hideous battle in which the passions
preyed