Mrs. Copas bore the marks of her husband's attentions: a long bruise over her right eye and down to the cheek-bone, and a cut on her upper lip which had swelled into an unsightly protuberance. Her spirit seemed to be entirely unaffected, and she beamed upon him from behind her temporary deformities. When she asked him if he had slept well, he lied and said he had slept like a top. She brought him hot water, razor, brush and soap, and he shaved. Off came his beard, and, after long scrutiny of his appearance in the mirror and timid hesitation, he removed the moustache which had been his pride and anxiety during his second year at Oxford, since when it had been his constant and unobtrusive companion. The effect was startling. His upper lip was long and had, if the faces of great men be any guide, the promise of eloquence. There was a new expression in his face, of boldness, of firmness, of--as he phrased it himself--benevolent obstinacy. His changed countenance gave him so much pleasure that he spent the morning gazing into the mirror at different angles. With such a brow, such an upper lip, such lines about the nose and chin, it seemed absurd that he should have spent twenty-five years as an assistant master in a secondary school. Then he laughed at himself as he realized that he was behaving as he had not done since the ambitious days at Oxford when he had endeavored to decide on a career. Ruefully he remembered that in point of fact he had not decided. With a second in Greats he had taken the first appointment that turned up. His history had been the history of thousands. One thing only he had escaped--marriage, the ordinary timid, matter-of-fact, sugar-coated marriage upon means that might or might not prove sufficient. After that, visiting his friends' houses, he had sighed sentimentally, but, with all the eligible women of his acquaintance--and they were not a few--he had been unable to avoid a quizzical tone which forbade the encouragement of those undercurrents upon which, he had observed, middle-aged men were swept painlessly into matrimony. . . . Pondering his clean-shaven face in the mirror he felt oddly youthful and excited.