had not seen there before. At all events, she was ashamed to see
him colour suddenly, and become a little incoherent, and to have
him turn to her his full attention, with a sort of boyish
clumsiness that was touching in its way. Imaginary or not, the
trifling episode troubled her, and as Madame Carter came
majestically in and the little clock on the dresser pointed to the
hour, she said her good-nights, and carried Nina off again.

Richard Carter's wife and mother differed in no particular more
strikingly than in their attitude toward the toilet artifices they
both employed so lavishly. The old lady's beauty was even more
than Isabelle's assisted by art, for her snowy-white hair was a
wig, her teeth not her own, and her eyebrows quite openly
manufactured without one single natural hair to build upon. But it
pleased her generation to regard these facts as sacred, and to
assume that the secrets of the boudoir were unsuspected. Even Nina
never saw so much as a powder puff in her grandmother's dressing
room, and any compliment upon her hair or complexion Madame Carter
received with gracious dignity.

She looked at Ward's departing back, now, and remarked with
pointed reproof:

"My son has never seen his mother even in the act of brushing her
hair! There are reserves--there are niceties--"

"Where did you have it brushed--down at the shop?" Isabelle asked,
laughing. Madame Carter never failed to be staggered by her
daughter-in-law's irreverence, yet she never could quite resist
the criticisms that courted it.