While she was cleansing herself for dinner, Clementina looked in the glass. Her hair, as usual, straggled untidily over her temples. She wore it bunched up anyhow in a knot behind, and the resentful hair-pins invariably failed in their office. This evening she removed the faithful few, the saving remnant that for the world’s good remains in all communities, even of hair-pins, and her hair thick and black fell about her shoulders. She combed it, brushed it, brought it up to the top of her head and twisting it into a neat coil held it there with her hand, and for a moment or two studied the effect somewhat dreamily. Then, all of a sudden, a change of mood swept over her. She let the hair down again, almost savagely wound it into its accustomed clump into which she thrust hair-pins at random, and turned away from the mirror, her mouth drawn into its old grim lines. Tommy found her rather uncommunicative at dinner which was served to them at a separate side table. At the table d’hôte in the middle of the room, eight or nine men, habitués and commercial travellers fed in stolid silence. She ate little. Tommy; noticing it, openly reproached himself for having caused her fatigue. The day in the open air—and open air pumped into the lungs at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour—was of itself tiring. He ought not to have dragged her about the town. Besides, he added with an appearance of great wisdom, a surfeit of beauty gave one a soul-ache. They had feasted on nothing but beauty since they had left Chalon-sur-Saône that morning. He, too, had a touch of soul-ache; but luckily it did not interfere with his carnal appetite. It ought not to interfere with Clementina’s. Here was the whitest and tenderest morsel of chicken that ever was and the crispest bit of delectable salad. He helped her from the dish which she had refused at the hands of the waiter, and she ate meekly. But after dinner, she sent him off to the café by himself, saying that she would read a novel in the salon and go to bed early. The loneliness of the salon, instead of resting her, got on her nerves; which angered her. What business had she, Clementina Wing, with nerves? Or was Tommy right? Perhaps it was soul-ache from which she was suffering. Certainly, one strove to pack away into oneself anything of beauty, making it a part of one’s spiritual being. One could be a glutton and suffer from the consequences. The soul-ache, if such it were, had nothing of origin in the emotions that had prompted her touch on Tommy’s arm, or the coiling of her hair on the top of her head. Nothing at all. Besides, it was a very silly novel, a modern French version of Daphnis and Chloe, in which Daphnis figured as a despicable young neuropath whom Tommy would have kicked on sight, and Chloe, a sly hussy whom a sensible mother would have spanked. She threw it into a corner and went to her room to brace her mind with Tristram Shandy.