One of her few certainties had been the discovery that, while small truths might be had from others, all that intimately and deeply concerned her was beyond questioning and advice. The importance of her attractiveness, for example, which seemed the base of her entire being, was completely out of accord with the accepted standard of values for middle-aged women. Other things, called moral and spiritual, she inferred, should take up her days and thoughts. There was a course of discipline--exactly like exercises in the morning--for the preparation of the willingness to die. But such an attitude was eternally beyond her; she repudiated it with a revolt stringing every nerve indignantly tense. She had had, on the whole, singularly little from life but her fine body; it had always been the temple and altar of her service, and no mere wordy reassurance could now repay her for its swift or gradual destruction. The latter, except for accident, would be her fate; she was remarkably sound. In her social adventures, the balls to which, without Arnaud, she occasionally went, she was morbid in her sensitive dread of discovering, through a waning admiration, that she was faded. It would be impossible to spend more care on her person than she had in the past; but that was unrelenting. Linda was inexorable in her demands on the establishments that made her suits and dresses. The slightest imperfection of fit exasperated her; and she regarded the endless change of fashions with contempt. This same shifting, she observed, occurred not only in women's clothes but in the women themselves. Linda remembered her mother, eternal in gaiety, but very obviously different from her in states of mind affecting her appearance. She was unable to define the change; but it was unmistakable--Stella Condon seemed a little old-fashioned. When now, to Lowrie's wife, Linda was unmistakably out-of-date. Lowrie, fast accomplishing all that had been predicted for him, had married a girl incomprehensible to his mother. Observing this later feminine development she had the baffled feeling of inspecting a creature of a new order. To Linda, Jean Tynedale, now a Hallet, seemed harder than ever her own famous coldness had succeeded in being. This came mostly from Jean's imposing education; there had been, in addition to the politest of finishing schools, college--a woman's concern, Bryn Mawr--and then post-graduate honors in a noteworthy university. She was entirely addressed, in a concrete way, to the abstract problems of social progress and hygiene; and, under thirty, the animating spirit, as well as financial support, of an incredible number of Settlements and allied undertakings. She spoke crisply before civic and other clubs; even, in the interest of suffrage, addressing nondescript audiences from a box on the street.