“Iris!” I said. Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair. It was like a boy’s hair, swept back from the forehead, which was a wide, clear forehead, clean and brave and sensible as a boy’s. Sensible, oh dear! The tawny cornstalks danced their formal dance on the one cheek that I could see, and the tip of a pierced ear played beneath them, like a mouse in the cornfield. Above her neck her hair died a very manly death, a more manly death than “bobbed” hair was ever known to die, and so it comes about that Iris Storm was the first Englishwoman I ever saw with “shingled” hair. This was in 1922. I decided that I did not know what to do. I decided that that was just as well. “I will play,” I thought, “a waiting game,” and lit a cigarette. But in her tawny hair the night was tangled like a promise, and it smelled as grass might smell in a faëry land, and always about her there was that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. Her mouth drooped like a flower, and there was a little shiny bit in the valley between her cheek and her nose. To this I applied a little _Quelques Fleurs_ talc powder on a handkerchief, that when she awoke she should not think so ill of herself as I did. Hers was a small, straight nose with an imperceptible curve, just as any straight line might have, and its tip quivered a little as she breathed. Her leather jacket _pour le sport_, that had a high collar trimmed with some minks, was flung open, and over the breast of her dark dress five small red elephants were marching towards an unknown destination. Towards her feet her hat lay with my hat. Gently, gently, gently as the phantom of myself, for was I not being better than myself? I would replace the emerald on the third finger of her right hand. I would, when hair that was not my own was pressed against my ear, and fingers that were not my own took the cigarette from my mouth, and teeth that were not mine bit my lip, and when the red elephants marching towards an unknown destination stirred breasts full of shadows, and a voice as clear and strong as daylight said: “But enough of this hell!” IV Of all that had once decorated the walls of my sitting-room there was left by the removers only a looking-glass in an ancient gold frame, above the fireplace. My mother had once given me an oil-painting, saying, “This will do nicely for your flat,” but I in my pride had thought a looking-glass would offend the frame more judiciously. She stood before that. “What is the time?” she asked her reflection, and I told her that it was ten minutes to six. “Have you a comb?” she asked of her reflection, and luckily I had a comb which was not my comb. She looked at it and saw that it was so. “Thank you,” she said to her reflection.