"Yes, they were French" said Clarissa. The other lady rose very sadly and took her bag, and looked at the gloves on the counter. But they were all too large--always too large at the wrist. "With pearl buttons" said the shop-girl, who looked ever so much older. She split the lengths of tissue paper apart on the counter. With pearl buttons, thought Clarissa, perfectly simple--how French! "Madame's hands are so slender" said the shop girl, drawing the glove firmly, smoothly, down over her rings. And Clarissa looked at her arm in the looking glass. The glove hardly came to the elbow. Were there others half an inch longer? Still it seemed tiresome to bother her--perhaps the one day in the month, thought Clarissa, when it's an agony to stand. "Oh, don't bother" she said. But the gloves were brought. "Don't you get fearfully tired" she said in her charming voice, "standing? When d'you get your holiday?" "In September, Madame, when we're not so busy." When we're in the country thought Clarissa. Or shooting. She has a fortnight at Brighton. In some stuffy lodging. The landlady takes the sugar. Nothing would be easier than to send her to Mrs Lumley's right in the country (and it was on the tip of her tongue). But then she remembered how on their honeymoon Dick had shown her the folly of giving impulsively. It was much more important, he said, to get trade with China. Of course he was right. And she could feel the girl wouldn't like to be given things. There she was in her place. So was Dick. Selling gloves was her job. She had her own sorrows quite separate, "and now can never mourn, can never mourn" the words ran in her head, "From the contagion of the world's slow stain" thought Clarissa holding her arm stiff, for there are moments when it seems utterly futile (the glove was drawn off leaving her arm flecked with powder)--simply one doesn't believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God. The traffic suddenly roared; the silk stockings brightened. A customer came in. "White gloves," she said, with some ring in her voice that Clarissa remembered. It used, thought Clarissa, to be so simple. Down down through the air came the caw of the rooks. When Sylvia died, hundreds of years ago, the yew hedges looked so lovely with the diamond webs in the mist before early church. But if Dick were to die to-morrow as for believing in God--no, she would let the children choose, but for herself, like Lady Bexborough, who opened the bazaar, they say, with the telegram in her hand--Roden, her favourite, killed--she would go on. But why, if one doesn't believe? For the sake of others, she thought, taking the glove in her hand. This girl would be much more unhappy if she didn't believe. "Thirty shillings" said the shopwoman. "No, pardon me Madame, thirty-five. The French gloves are more." For one doesn't live for oneself, thought Clarissa. And then the other customer took a glove, tugged it, and it split. "There!" she exclaimed.