The Pretext

I

MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed
with a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence
up the narrow stairs to her bedroom.

Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so
quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry
for, save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without
fostering elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived,
communicated to her by her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found
expression in her girlish flight upstairs, her girlish impatience to
bolt herself into her room with her throbs and her blushes.

Her blushes? Was she really blushing?

She approached the cramped eagle-topped mirror above her plain prim
dressing-table: just such a meagre concession to the weakness of the
flesh as every old-fashioned house in Wentworth counted among its
relics. The face reflected in this unflattering surface--for even
the mirrors of Wentworth erred on the side of depreciation--did not
seem, at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the
tenderer emotions, and its owner blushed more deeply as the fact was
forced upon her.

Her fair hair had grown too thin--it no longer quite hid the blue
veins in her candid forehead--a forehead that one seemed to see
turned toward professorial desks, in large bare halls where a snowy
winter light fell uncompromisingly on rows of "thoughtful women."
Her mouth was thin, too, and a little strained; her lips were too
pale; and there were lines in the corners of her eyes. It was a face
which had grown middle-aged while it waited for the joys of youth.

Well--but if she could still blush? Instinctively she drew back a
little, so that her scrutiny became less microscopic, and the pretty
lingering pink threw a veil over her pallor, the hollows in her
temples, the faint wrinkles of inexperience about her lips and eyes.
How a little colour helped! It made her eyes so deep and shining.
She saw now why bad women rouged. . . . Her redness deepened at the
thought.

But suddenly she noticed for the first time that the collar of her
dress was cut too low. It showed the shrunken lines of the throat.
She rummaged feverishly in a tidy scentless drawer, and snatching
out a bit of black velvet, bound it about her neck. Yes--that was
better. It gave her the relief she needed. Relief--contrast--that
was it! She had never had any, either in her appearance or in her
setting. She was as flat as the pattern of the wall-paper--and so
was her life. And all the people about her had the same look.
Wentworth was the kind of place where husbands and wives gradually
grew to resemble each other--one or two of her friends, she
remembered, had