These thoughts came back to her with particular force on the evening of Anne’s reappearance at the Opera. During the weeks since old Mrs. Clephane’s death the Clephane box had stood severely empty; even when the Opera House was hired for some charity entertainment, Anne sent a cheque but refused to give the box. It was awfully “archaic”, as Nollie Tresselton said; but somehow it suited Anne, was as much in her “style” as the close braids folded about her temples. “After all, it’s not so easy to be statuesque, and I like Anne’s memorial manner,” Nollie concluded. Tonight the period of formal mourning for old Mrs. Clephane was over, and Anne was to go to the Opera with her mother. She had asked the Joe Tresseltons and her guardian to join them first at a little dinner, and Kate Clephane had gone up to dress rather earlier than usual. It was her first public appearance, also, and--as on each occasion of her new life when she came on some unexpected survival of her youth, a face, a voice, a point of view, a room in which the furniture had not been changed--she was astonished, and curiously agitated, at setting out from the very same house for the very same Opera box. The only difference would be in the mode of progression; she remembered the Parisian landau and sixteen-hand chestnuts with glittering plated harness that had waited at the door in her early married days. Then she had a vision of her own toilet, of the elaborate business it used to be: Aline’s predecessor, with cunning fingers, dividing and coiling the generous ripples of her hair, and building nests of curls about the temples and in the nape; then the dash up in her dressing-gown to Anne’s nursery for a last kiss, and the hurrying back to get into her splendid brocade, to fasten the diamond coronet, the ruby “sunburst”, the triple pearls. John Clephane was fond of jewels, and particularly proud of his wife’s, first because he had chosen them, and secondly because he had given them to her. She sometimes thought he really admired her only when she had them all on, and she often reflected ironically on Esther’s wifely guile in donning her regal finery before she ventured to importune Ahasuerus. It certainly increased Kate Clephane’s importance in her husband’s eyes to know that, when she entered her box, no pearls could hold their own against hers except Mrs. Beaufort’s and old Mrs. Goldmere’s.