"Don't—say that! I can't bear to think how ugly I'm getting."
Her husband looked at her with a faint, bewildered smile. "Come!" he adjured her, "you mustn't get morbid. You're not ugly, you silly girl. You were one of the prettiest girls I ever saw."
"But now?"
"Now?" He looked at her quickly. "You're as pretty as ever you were, of course."
"I'm not," she denied, reading the lie in his eyes.
"Women are bound to change, no doubt," he conceded. "I daresay having the babies aged you a bit. But you needn't get anxious about your looks yet."
"I'm not thirty, but I look it."
"No, no, you don't," he said constrainedly.
She smiled, and contented herself with watching him eat the next course while she toyed with it. As a woman, food meant little to her; she was concerned more with the prettiness of its serving; but Osborn was avidly hungry and his enjoyment was palpable.
She thought: "Poor boy! How he likes the good things of life! And how few of them he gets! He oughtn't to have married."