Her eyes shone as she spoke, and she would have enjoyed describing all Lucy's clothes, for she loved pretty things, though she never bought them for herself, finding it impossible to break the habit of more than twenty years of economy; but Jenny, who was proud of her sincerity, looked so plainly bored that she checked her flowing descriptions. "I hope you brought something beautiful to wear to-morrow, Jenny?" she ventured timidly, after a silence. "Of course I had to get a new dress, as I'm to be maid of honour, but it seemed so extravagant, for I had two perfectly good white chiffons already." "But it would have hurt Lucy, dear, if you hadn't worn something new. She even wanted me to order my dress from New York, but I was so afraid of wounding poor little Miss Willy--she has made my clothes ever since I could remember--that I persuaded the child to let her make it. Of course, it won't be stylish, but nobody will look at me anyway." "I hope it is coloured, mother. You wear black too much. The psychological effect is not good for you." With her knees on the floor and her back bent over the trunk into which she was packing a dozen pairs of slippers wrapped in tissue paper, Virginia turned her head and stared in bewilderment at her daughter, whose classic profile showed like marble flushed with rose in the lamplight. "But at my time of life, dear? Why, I'm in my forty-sixth year." "But forty-six is still young, mother. That was one of the greatest mistakes women used to make--to imagine that they must be old as soon as men ceased to make love to them. It was all due to the idea that men admired only schoolgirls and that as soon as a woman stopped being admired she had stopped living." "But they didn't stop living really. They merely stopped fixing up." "Oh, of course. They spent the rest of their lives in the storeroom or the kitchen slaving for the comfort of the men they could no longer amuse." This so aptly described Virginia's own situation that her interest in Lucy's trousseau faded abruptly, while a wave of heartsickness swept over her. It was as if the sharp and searching light of truth had fallen suddenly upon all the frail and lovely pretences by which she had helped herself to live and to be happy. A terror of the preternatural insight of youth made her turn her face away from Jenny's too critical eyes. "But what else could they do, Jenny? They believed that it was right to step back and make room for the young," she said, with a pitiful attempt at justification of her exploded virtues. "Oh, _mother_!" exclaimed Jenny still sweetly, "whoever heard of a man of that generation stepping back to make room for anybody?" "But men are different, darling. One doesn't expect them to give up like women." "Oh, mother!"--this time the sweetness had borrowed an edge of irony. It was Science annihilating tradition, and the tougher the tradition, the keener the blade which Science must apply.