Debby felt so sorry for the women who had been beautiful. She could imagine how the decay of rosehood must hurt. It is not necessary to have been Napoleon to understand Elba. One day a sad, heavy figure dragged along Deborah’s aisle and sank upon the mushroom stool in front of her. Deborah could hardly believe that it was Josie Shillaber. She could hardly force back the shock that leaped to her expression. From thin, white lips crumpled with pain came a voice like a rustling of dead leaves in a November gust. And the voice said, with a kind of envy in it: "Why, Deborah, how well you look!" "Oh, I am well!" Deborah chanted, then repressed her cheer unconsciously. It was not tactful to be too well. "That is, I’m tol’able. And how are you this awful weather?" "Not well, Debby. I’m not a bit well; no, I’m never well any more. Why, your hair is getting right white, isn’t it, dear? But it’s real becoming to you. Mine is all gray, too, you see, but it’s awful!" "Indeed it’s not! It’s fine! Your children must love it. Don’t they?" "Oh, the children!" Josie wailed. "What do they think of me? The grown ones are away, all flirting and getting married. They say they’ll come back, but they never do. But I don’t care. I don’t want them to see me like this. And the young ones are so selfish and inconsiderate. It’s awful, getting old, isn’t it, Debby? It don’t seem to worry you, though. I suppose it’s because you haven’t had sorrow in your life as I have. I’m looking for something to wear, Debby. The styles aren’t what they used to be. There’s not a thing fit to wear to a dog-fight in these new colors. What are people coming to? I can’t find a thing to wear. What would you suggest? Do help me!" Deborah emptied the shelves upon the counter, sent to the stock-room for new shipments that had not been listed yet, ransacked the place; but there was nothing there for the woman whose husband owned it all. The physician’s wife was sick with time, and even he could not cure her of that. The draper’s wife was turning old; he could not swaddle her from the chill of that winter. Josie was trying to dress up a rose whose petals had fallen, whose sepals were curled back; the husk could not endure colors that the blossom had honored. Josie, however, would not acknowledge the inevitable autumn; she would not grow old with the grace of resignation. She limped from the store, shaking her unlovely head. Could this be Josie Shillaber, who had romped through life with beauty in and about everything she was and wore and did? Deborah could have moralized over her as Hamlet over Yorick’s skull: Where be your petal cheeks, your full, red lips, your concise chin, and that long, lithe throat, and those pearly shoulders, and all that high-breasted, spindle-hipped, lean-limbed girlishness of yours? And where your velocity, your tireless laughter, your amorous enterprise?