That expressed her whole experience. She had never keenly associated the thought of death with herself before, and she was unutterably revolted by the impending destruction of her fine body, the delicate care of which formed her main preoccupation in life. Age was supremely distasteful, but this other ... she shuddered. Linda wanted desperately to preserve the whiteness of her skin, the flexible black distinction of her hair, yes--her beauty. Here, again, with other women the vicarious immortality of children would be sufficient. But not for her. She was in the room that had been hers before marriage, with her infinite preparations for the night at an end; and, her hair loose across the blanched severity of her attire, her delicately full arms bare, she clasped her cold hands in stabbing apprehension. She would do anything, anything, to escape that repulsive fatality to her lavished care. It was only to be accomplished by being good; and goodness was in the charge of the minister. She saw clearly and at once her difficulty--how could she go to a solemn man in a clerical vest and admit that she was solely concerned by the impending loss of her beauty. The promised splendor of heaven, in itself, failed to move her--it threatened to be monotonous; and she was honest in her recognition that charity, the ugliness of poverty, repelled her. Linda was certain that she could never change in these particulars; she could only pretend. A surprising multiplication of such pretense occurred to her in people regarded as impressively religious. She had seen men like that--she vaguely thought of the name Jasper--going off with her mother in cabs to dinners that must have been “godless.” She wondered if this mere attitude, the public show, were enough. And an instinctive response told her that it was not. If all she had been informed about the future were true she decided that her mother's chance was no worse than that of any false display of virtue. She, Linda, could do nothing. The funeral ceremony with its set form--so inappropriate to her mother's qualities--was even more remote from Linda's sympathies than was common in her encounters. But Mr. Moses Feldt's grief appeared to her actual and affecting. He invested every one with the purity of his own spirit. She left New York at the first possible moment with the feeling that she was definitely older. The realization, she discovered, happened in that way--ordinarily giving the flight of time no consideration it was brought back to her at intervals of varying length. As she aged they would grow shorter.