"Well, you see, I am tremendously _intriguee_, like every one else. I'd met her several times at home, and she came one day to my studio, where the Sophisticates made the most tremendous fuss over her. But I was curious to see her in her own old home, where she had reigned so long ago as Mary Ogden. Mother told me that everything was unchanged except the stair carpet and her bedroom." Her tone was lightly impersonal, and still more so as she added: "Why don't you write a novel about her, Lee? She must be the most remarkable psychological study of the age. Fancy living two lifetimes in the same body. It puts reincarnation to the blush. I suppose she'll bury us all." Clavering shot her a sharp investigating glance, but replied suavely: "Not necessarily. The same road is open to all of you." Miss Goodrich had never looked more the fine and dignified representative of her class as she lifted her candid eyes with an expression of disdain. "My dear Lee! Really! There _are_ some women above that sort of thing." "Above? I don't think I follow you. But of course she's given hide-bound conservatism a pretty hard jolt." "It's not that--really. But all women growing old and trying to be or to look young again are rather undignified--according to our standards at least, and I have been brought up in the belief that they are the highest in the world. And then, one's sense of humor----!" "Humor? Is that what you call it?" (Damn all women for cats, the best of them. Anne!) "Why, yes, isn't it rather absurd--for more reasons than one? To my mind it is the complete farce. She has regained the appearance--and--_possibly_--the real feeling of youth, with all its capacity for enthusiasm and unworn emotions--it seems rather ludicrous, but still it may be; certainly the interior should be in some degree a match for that marvellously restored face and body--but the whole thing is made farcical by the fact that she never can have children. And what else does youth in women really mean?" "Experience has taught me that it means quite a number of other things. And painting portraits is not fulfilling the first and highest duty of womanhood, dear Anne." Miss Goodrich flushed, but accepted his score calmly. "Oh, I shall marry, of course. But then, you see, I am young--really young." "What are you two quarrelling about?" broke in Miss Lawrence's husky voice. She had smoked steadily since taking her seat at the table, not so much because she had an irresistible passion for tobacco as because it destroyed her appetite and preserved her figure. "I haven't seen Anne blush like that since she got back from France." "I was just telling her how beautiful she looked tonight." And angry as he was, it amused him to hear Anne's little gasp of pleasure.