And it was Craven’s fault. He should have been like other young men, obedient to the call of beauty and youth; he should have been wax in Beryl Van Tuyn’s pretty hands. Then this would never have happened, this crumbling of will. He had done a cruel thing without being aware of his cruelty. He had been carried away by something that was not primarily physical. And in yielding to that uncommon impulse, which proved that he was not typical, he had set in activity, in this hidden and violent activity, that which had been sleeping so deeply as to seem like something dead. As Lady Sellingworth looked into the Venetian mirror, which made her ugliness of age look uglier than it was, she regretted sharply that she had allowed herself to grow old in this fearfully definite way. It was too horrible to look like this and to be waiting eagerly, with an almost deceiving eagerness, for the opening of a door, a footfall, the sound of a voice that was young. Mrs. Ackroyd, Lady Archie Brook--they looked surely twenty years younger than she did. She had been a fool! She had been a passionate, impulsive fool! No; she was being a fool now. If only Caroline Briggs were in London! At that moment Lady Sellingworth longed to be defended against herself. She felt that she was near to the edge of a precipice, but that perhaps a strong hand could pull her away from it into the safety she had known for ten years. “I am sixty. That settles it. There is nothing to be excited about, nothing to look for, nothing to draw back from or refuse. The fact that I am sixty and look as I do settles the whole matter.” They were brave words, but unfortunately they altered nothing. Feeling was untouched by them. Even conviction was not attained. Lady Sellingworth knew she was sixty, but she felt like a woman of thirty at that moment. And yet she was not deceived, was not deceiving herself. She did know--or felt that she absolutely knew--that the curious spell she had evidently been able, how she scarcely knew, to exert upon Craven during his visit to her that night could not possibly be lasting. He must be a quite unusual young man, perhaps even in some degree abnormal. But even so the fascination he had felt, and had shown that he felt, could not possibly be a lasting fascination. In such matters she _knew_. Therefore surely the way was plain before her. Ten years ago she had made up her mind, as a woman seldom makes up her mind. She had seen facts, basic facts, naked in a glare of light. Those facts had not changed. But she had changed. She was ten years older. The horror of passing into the fifties had died out in the cold resignation of passing into the sixties. Any folly now would be ten times more foolish than a folly of ten years ago. She told herself that, reiterated it.