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 upon the ideals, the body upon the soul. She thought of Perry
Bridewell, of his healthy animalism, his complacent self-esteem, while
her heart hardened within her. Was love, when all was said, merely a
subjection to the flesh instead of an enlargement of the spirit? Did it
depend for its very existence upon the dress-maker's art and the
primitive instinct of the chase? Had it no soul within it to keep it
clean? Could it see or hear only through the eye or the ear of sense?

"O Gerty, Gerty," she said, "if I could only make you see!"

But Gerty, with one of those swift changes of humour which made her
moods at once so unexpected and so irresistible, had burst into a peal
of mocking laughter.