what they look like--sensible clergymen's wives in the provinces, and
others unknown to fashion--remain as brown as a berry, or as pleasantly
auburn as the rind of a chestnut.

The knowledge of those hidden white hairs haunted her. She felt horribly
ashamed of them. She hated them with an intense, and almost despairing,
hatred. For they stamped the terrific difference between her body and
her nature.

It seemed to her that in her nature she retained all the passions of
youth. This was not strictly true, for no woman over forty has precisely
the same passions as an ardent girl, however ardent she may be. But the
"wild heart," spoken of by Lady Sellingworth to Craven, still beat in
her breast, and the vanity of the girl, enormously increased by the
passage of the years, still lived intensely in the middle-aged woman.
It was perhaps this natural wildness combined with her vanity which
tortured Lady Sellingworth most at this period of her life. She still
desired happiness and pleasure greedily, indeed with almost unnatural
greediness; she still felt that life robbed of the admiration and the
longing of men would not be worth living.

Beryl Van Tuyn had spoken of a photograph of Lady Sellingworth taken
when she was about forty-nine, and had said that, though very handsome,
it showed a _fausse jeunesse_, and revealed a woman looking vain and
imperious, a woman with the expression of one always on the watch for
new lovers. And there had been a cruel truth in her words. For, from the
time when she had given herself to artificiality until the time, some
nine years later, when she had plunged into what had seemed to her,
and to many others, something very like old age, Lady Sellingworth had
definitely and continuously deteriorated, as all those do who try