The business of getting Mrs. Greene dressed for the day was exhausting both for her and for Miss Dorset, but there were few days in the year when her indomitable courage and vitality allowed her to lie abed and forgo the effort for twenty-four hours. The irritation involved in thrusting out each leg to have its stocking drawn on was so intense as to amount to pain; her back ached and her skin tingled. It was infinite weariness to get her arms into her sleeves and keep her head steady to have her hair done, but Mrs. Greene faced these ordeals with fortitude and equanimity. Every morning the indignity of physical helplessness struck her afresh, but every morning she banished the thought with resolution and ignored in conversation the difficulties of her toilet. Her good humour never failed her here, and Miss Dorset was too well versed in the intricacies of her employer's code of reticence ever to provoke her by an allusion to the matter in hand. Usually during that painful three quarters of an hour they discussed the news of the day which both had absorbed during breakfast, Mrs. Greene with genuine interest in current activities, Miss Dorset uninterested, except in so far as they provided a topic of discussion attractive to Mrs. Greene. Mrs. Rodney's letter, however, altered the trend of Mrs. Greene's conversation for this one morning. "What dress have I got to wear at my daughter-in-law's dinner?" she asked crisply. "I won't wear black and I think my grey satin is getting shabby." "I think perhaps it is a little," agreed Miss Dorset. "But it always looks very nice." "Shabby and nice don't go together," was the uncompromising reply. "We'll write to Madame Fenella to-day and ask her to send down a fitter with some patterns of grey satin and brocade. I'll wear my diamond necklace, and grey is a good background. You know, Miss Dorset, I've always liked nice dresses." "I know you have, Mrs. Greene; all your things have been beautiful as long as I've known you." "But it was before you knew me that I had my best things," said Mrs. Greene staring into the mirror, but not seeing the face ragged with age reflected in it. Seeing herself instead forty, fifty and sixty years ago when she was ardent and lovely. "There was a sea-green poplin," she said dreamily. "A silk poplin that Geoffrey liked very much. That was the summer when Edwin was ten; I remember going up in it to kiss him good-night. And before that there was a blue velvet, peacock blue we called it, with a tight bodice and a flounced skirt all drawn to the back. But when I was a girl, before I married, it was always white. I remember asking my mother for a red evening dress but she wouldn't hear of it, so I didn't get one till long after I married--and then it didn't suit me." Mrs. Greene smiled, thinking of the red dress that had been a failure, and then went on musingly: