But in any case, every inconvenience was paid for a thousand times by the delights of these confidential conversations in front of the dressing-table mirror. While the young girl brushed and brushed away at the long tresses of pale golden-brown hair, Mrs. Aldwinkle, her eyes shut, and with an expression of beatitude on her face—for she took a cat’s pleasure in the brushing—would talk, spasmodically, in broken sentences, of the events of the day, of her guests, of the people they had met; or of her own past, of plans for the future—hers or Irene’s—of love. On all these subjects Mrs. Aldwinkle spoke intimately, confidentially, without reserve. Feeling that she was being treated by her Aunt Lilian as entirely grown-up and almost as an equal, Irene was proud and grateful. Without deliberately setting out to complete the subjugation of her niece, Mrs. Aldwinkle had discovered, in those midnight conversations, the most perfect means for achieving this end. If she talked like this to Irene, it was merely because she felt the need of talking intimately to some one, and because there was nobody else to talk to. Incidentally, however, she had contrived in the process to make the girl her slave. Made her Aunt Lilian’s confidant, invested, so to speak, with a title of honour, Irene felt a gratitude which strengthened her original childish attachment to her aunt. Meanwhile, she had learned to talk with an airy familiarity of many things concerning which young girls are supposed to be ignorant, and of which, indeed, she herself knew, except intellectually and at second hand, nothing. She had learned to be knowing and worldly wise, in the void, so to speak, and with no personal knowledge of the world. Gravely, ingenuously, she would say things that could only be uttered out of the depths of the profoundest innocence, amplifying and making embarrassingly explicit in public things that Mrs. Aldwinkle had only fragmentarily hinted at in the confidential small hours. She regarded herself as immensely mature. To-night Mrs. Aldwinkle was in a rather gloomy, complaining mood. “I’m getting old,” she said, sighing, and opening her eyes for a moment to look at her image in the glass that confronted her. The image did not deny the statement. “And yet I always feel so young.” “That’s what really matters,” Irene declared. “And besides, it’s nonsense; you’re not old; you don’t look old.” In Irene’s eyes, moreover, she really didn’t look old. “People don’t like one any more when one gets old,” Mrs. Aldwinkle continued. “Friends are terribly faithless. They fall away.” She sighed. “When I think of all the friends....” She left the sentence unfinished.