Anna was still wondering when and in what conjunction of circumstances the much-married Laura had acquired a partner so conspicuous for his personal charms, when the young man returned to announce: “She says it’s all right, if you don’t mind seeing her in bed.” He drew aside to let Anna pass, and she found herself in a dim untidy scented room, with a pink curtain pinned across its single window, and a lady with a great deal of fair hair and uncovered neck smiling at her from a pink bed on which an immense powder-puff trailed. “You don’t mind, do you? He costs such a frightful lot that I can’t afford to send him off,” Mrs. Birch explained, extending a thickly-ringed hand to Anna, and leaving her in doubt as to whether the person alluded to were her masseur or her husband. Before a reply was possible there was a convulsive stir beneath the pink expanse, and something that resembled another powder-puff hurled itself at Anna with a volley of sounds like the popping of Lilliputian champagne corks. Mrs. Birch, flinging herself forward, gasped out: “If you’d just give him a caramel ... there, in that box on the dressing-table ... it’s the only earthly thing to stop him...” and when Anna had proffered this sop to her assailant, and he had withdrawn with it beneath the bedspread, his mistress sank back with a laugh. “Isn’t he a beauty? The Prince gave him to me down at Nice the other day--but he’s perfectly awful,” she confessed, beaming intimately on her visitor. In the roseate penumbra of the bed-curtains she presented to Anna’s startled gaze an odd chromo-like resemblance to Sophy Viner, or a suggestion, rather, of what Sophy Viner might, with the years and in spite of the powder-puff, become. Larger, blonder, heavier-featured, she yet had glances and movements that disturbingly suggested what was freshest and most engaging in the girl; and as she stretched her bare plump arm across the bed she seemed to be pulling back the veil from dingy distances of family history. “Do sit down, if there’s a place to sit on,” she cordially advised; adding, as Anna took the edge of a chair hung with miscellaneous raiment: “My singing takes so much time that I don’t get a chance to walk the fat off--that’s the worst of being an artist.” Anna murmured an assent. “I hope it hasn’t inconvenienced you to see me; I told Mr. Birch--” “Mr. WHO?” the recumbent beauty asked; and then: “Oh, JIMMY!” she faintly laughed, as if more for her own enlightenment than Anna’s. The latter continued eagerly: “I understand from Mrs. Farlow that your sister was with you, and I ventured to come up because I wanted to ask you when I should have a chance of finding her.” Mrs. McTarvie-Birch threw back her head with a long stare. “Do you mean to say the idiot at the door didn’t tell you? Sophy went away last night.”