That was what the sunrise reminded Kate Clephane of--as she supposed it did most women of forty-two or so (or was it really forty-four last week?) For nearly twenty years now she had lived chiefly with women of her own kind, and she no longer very sincerely believed there were any others, that is to say among women properly so called. Her female world was made up of three categories: frumps, hypocrites and the “good sort”--like herself. After all, the last was the one she preferred to be in. Not that she could not picture another life--if only one had met the right man at the right hour. She remembered her one week--that tiny little week of seven days, just six years ago--when she and Chris had gone together to a lost place in Normandy where there wasn’t a railway within ten miles, and you had to drive in the farmer’s cart to the farm-house smothered in apple-blossoms; and Chris and she had gone off every morning for the whole day, while he sketched by willowy river-banks, and under the flank of mossy village churches; and every day for seven days she had watched the farm-yard life waking at dawn under their windows, while she dashed herself with cold water and did her hair and touched up her face before he was awake, because the early light is so pitiless after thirty. She remembered it all, and how sure she had been then that she was meant to live on a farm and keep chickens; just as sure as he was that he was meant to be a painter, and would already have made a name if his parents hadn’t called him back to Baltimore and shoved him into a broker’s office after Harvard--to have him off their minds, as he said. Yes, she could still picture that kind of life: every fibre in her kept its glow. But she didn’t believe in it; she knew now that “things didn’t happen like that” for long, that reality and durability were attributes of the humdrum, the prosaic and the dreary. And it was to escape from reality and durability that one plunged into cards, gossip, flirtation, and all the artificial excitements which society so lavishly provides for people who want to forget. She and Chris had never repeated that week. He had never suggested doing so, and had let her hints fall unheeded, or turned them off with a laugh, whenever she tried, with shy tentative allusions, to coax him back to the idea; for she had found out early that one could never ask him anything point-blank--it just put his back up, as he said himself. One had to manœuvre and wait; but when didn’t a woman have to manœuvre and wait? Ever since she had left her husband, eighteen years ago, what else had she ever done? Sometimes, nowadays, waking alone and unrefreshed in her dreary hotel room, she shivered at the memory of all the scheming, planning, ignoring, enduring, accepting, which had led her in the end to--this. Ah, well-- “Aline!”