It did not take all women in the same way, she reflected. Many went through life so entirely satisfied with inessentials; so half-awake. Most had never been lovers or had lovers. But those who had----! No death of a sweetheart in early youth, no cruel jilting, no bitter matrimonial experience, nothing, nothing! could compare with the poignant, crushing, rending pain of those years when Youth and Love slip away from the woman. It is a long black tunnel of misery from which she emerges (having lost much but accepted, bowed her head, folded her hands) into the grey afternoon of Life. And then----Heaven's blessing on the maternal sense that is rich in any real woman's character, even if she never has a child at all! For it is this that comes to her aid; and she spreads it out over the girls and the men she knows; caring, helping, sympathizing with all their love emotions (or lack or them). Henceforward everything must be vicariously felt by her. She must live in the lives of her children; in their professions and interests; she must love through her young friends ... Little Olwen ... Golden.... As she thought of these Untried, their friend smiled over a tag of verse that came into her mind with the image that seemed its illustration. "Oh, tarnish late on Wenlock Edge, Gold that I never see! Lie long, high snowdrifts on the hedge, That will not shower on me." Prayer, she thought, can take odd forms----well, this was hers for the happiness of her girl-friends. Golden, she thought, would be in bed by now. A nearer growling of guns, from the north, she judged, sounded as she tapped at the door. "Come!" called the charming un-English voice. Mrs. Cartwright entered her own familiar room with its known mingling of kuss-kuss, rose, and orris scent. The toilet silver, the Indian numnah on the floor, her husband's sword and sash over the bookshelf, and the enlarged photograph of him laughing under the black, semi-lune shadow of his solar-topi----these things were Claudia's background. Her eyes opened upon them each morning. Tonight they all seemed suddenly new to her.... It was because they were now a background to this radiant stranger in her room. Out of that cloud of loosened gold on her pillow there looked the face of a beauty as rare as any that had ever been kissed awake by a fairy prince. "Oh, my dear," exclaimed Mrs. Cartwright, involuntarily. "How lovely you are, Golden; how lovely!" Paradoxical enough it might seem to some women, but this woman thanked Heaven it was a girl so beautiful who had supplanted her, or rather, to whom she had relinquished that beautiful boy. She could not have endured to see Jack choose a bride unworthy in body or mind, least of all one who might be as the ordinary "nice" pretty girl often is, a bundle of mere sentiment and frigidity. To Golden she could give him. Actually she had brought them together. And now it was to his best woman-friend that the young flier confided his sweetheart.