All this, too, had become dim to her since she had known Chris. For the first time, when she met him, her soul’s lungs seemed full of air. Life still dated for her from that day--in spite of the way he had hurt her, of his having inflicted on her the bitterest pain she had ever suffered, he had yet given her more than he could take away. At thirty-nine her real self had been born; without him she would never have had a self.... And yet, at what a cost she had bought it! All the secluded penitential years that had gone before wiped out at a stroke--stained, defiled by follies she could not bear to think of, among people from whom her soul recoiled. Poor Chris! It was not that he was what is called “vicious”--but he was never happy without what he regarded as excitement; he was always telling her that an artist had to have excitement. She could not reconcile his idea of what this stimulus consisted in with his other tastes and ideas--with that flashing play of intelligence which had caught her up into an air she had never breathed before. To be capable of that thought-play, of those flights, and yet to need gambling, casinos, rowdy crowds, and all the pursuits devised to kill time for the uninventive and lethargic! He said he saw things in that kind of life that she couldn’t see--but since he also saw this unseeable (and she knew he did) in nature, in poetry and painting, in their shared sunsets and moonrises, in their first long dreaming days, far from jazz-bands and baccarat tables, why wasn’t that enough, and how could the other rubbishy things excite the same kind of emotions in him? It had been the torment of her torments, the inmost pang of her misery, that she had never understood; and that when she thought of him now it was through that blur of noise and glare and popping corks and screaming bands that she had to grope back to the first fleeting Chris who had loved her and waked her. * * * * * At eleven o’clock she found herself, she didn’t know how, at the milliner’s. Other women, envious or undecided, were already flattening their noses against the panes. “That bird of Paradise ... what they cost nowadays!” But she went in, cool and confident, and asked gaily to try on her new hat. She must have been smiling, for the saleswoman received her with a smile. “What a complexion, ma’am! One sees you’re not afraid of the wind.” But when the hat was produced, though it was the copy of one she had already tried on, it struck Mrs. Clephane as absurdly youthful, even ridiculous. Had she really been dressing all this time like a girl in her teens? “You forget that I’ve a grown-up daughter, Madame Berthe.” _“Allons, Madame plaisante!”_