This shaft, perhaps not intended to be a shaft, went home. Lady Sellingworth reddened and looked down.
“I dare say it is,” she murmured. “But—no doubt some of us are more subject to temptation than others.”
“I’m sure that is so.”
“It’s very difficult to give up deliberately nearly all that has made life interesting and attractive to you ever since you can remember. Caroline, would you advise me to—to abdicate? You know what I mean.”
Miss Briggs’s rather plain, but very intelligent, face softened.
“Adela, my dear,” she said, “I understand a great deal more than you have cared to hint at to me.”
“I know you do.”
“I think that unless you change your way of life in time you are heading straight for tragedy. We both know a lot of women who try to defy the natural law. Many of them are rather beautiful women. But do you think they are happy women? I don’t. I know they aren’t. Youth laughs at them. I don’t know what you feel about it, but I think I would rather be pelted with stones than be jeered at by youth in my middle age. Respect may sound a very dull word, but I think there’s something very warm in it when it surrounds you as you get old. In youth we want love, of course, all of us. But in middle age we want respect too. And nothing else takes its place. There’s a dignity of the soul, and women like us—I’m older than you, but still we are neither of us very young any longer—only throw it away at a terrible price. When I want to see tragedy I look at the women who try to hang on to what refuses to stay with them. And I soon have to shut my eyes. It’s too painful. It’s like looking at bones decked out with jewels.”
Lady Sellingworth sat very still. There was a long silence between the two friends. When they spoke again they spoke of other things.
That night Lady Sellingworth told her maid to pack up, as she was returning to London by the morning express on the following day.