"She knows now," said old Mrs. Waterlow, who remained unsmiling, but with a placidity full of satisfaction; "and she'll hardly be able to forget."
"I'm quite sure," said Cicely, "that she really believes that she cares for the new drawing-room. People can persuade themselves so easily of new tastes. And why shouldn't they have them? I believe that Gwendolen does like it."
"Yes, she does indeed," said old Mrs. Waterlow. "She says so. She says she never cared for any room so much and that she intends to live and die with it. Her only refuge now is to go on faithfully loving it. So there she is, buttoned into her black satin for ever!"
Until now Mrs. Conyers has remained faithful, and her consistency is still made good to her; for none of her drawing-rooms has brought her such appreciation. Chislebridge has never dared to emulate it; Mr. Chambers and his friends have often painted it, and Mrs. Waterlow's original, like a gay jest, uttered and then gone for ever, is no longer in existence to vex and perplex her with its mocking smile. Moreover, her own drawing-room no longer lacks its travesty of a soul. Owen married Cicely Waterlow in the autumn, and Gwendolen, magnanimous, and burning her bridges behind her, sent them for their wedding-present her two lovely and unique red lacquer cabinets. One stands in the front, and one in the back drawing-room in the little house in St. Leonard's Terrace, and Cicely said to Owen on the day they arrived that any wrong of the past, if wrong there had been, was now atoned for. And when they married and went round the world for their wedding-trip, they found in China a white pagoda, unflawed, larger, more sublimely elegant than the old one. This they brought back to Gwendolen, and with unfaltering courage she has placed it upon her mahogany centre table.
THE SUICIDE
A COMEDY
She took the bottle from its wrappings and looked at it—at its apparent insignificance and the huge significance of the glaring word "Poison" printed across it. She looked resolutely, and as resolutely went with it to the other side of the room, and locked it away in the drawer of her dressing-table. She paused here, and her eyes met her mirrored eyes. The expression of her face arrested her attention. Did people who were going to die usually look so calm, so placid? Really, it was a sort of placidity that gazed back at her, so unlike the disfigured, tear-blinded reflection that had been there that morning—when she had read the paper. After the tempest of despair, the frozen decision, the nightmare securing of the means of death (if any one should guess! stop her!) it was indeed a sort of apathy that drenched her being, as if already the drug had gone through it. The face in the mirror was very young and very helpless and very charming. It was like the face of a little wind-blown ghost, with its tossed-back hair and wide, empty, gazing eyes. The sweetness of the wasted cheeks and soft, parted lips suddenly smote on the apathy, and tears came. She pressed her hands over her eyes, struggled, and mastered herself again. Her own pathos must not unnerve, and her unbearable sorrow must nerve, her.
She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Just three. She could give herself ample time for writing the letter; then she must go and post it. Before five she would be back here—locked in her room. Before six—