The form of the request had not changed, but there was a deeper note in her voice: the irony, which had been at first only a glancing edge to her smile, a subdued flash in her eyes, had passed now into her speech.

George, looking sideways at the slightly austere charm of her profile, thought suddenly, "Gabriella is growing hard." He noticed, too, for the first time, that she looked older since the birth of the baby, that her bosom was fuller and that her figure, which had always been good, was now lovely in its long flowing lines.

She was handsomer than she had been before her marriage, for her complexion had become clearer since she had lived in the North, and though she was still pale, her skin was losing its sallow tone.
Yet, though he thought her more attractive than she had been as a girl, she had ceased to make the faintest appeal to his senses.

There were times even when he wondered how she had ever appealed to him, for she had not been beautiful, and beauty had always seemed to him to be essential in the women with whom one fell in love.

But, however it had happened, still it had happened, and she was now his wife and the mother of the adorable Frances Evelyn.
"I'm awfully cut up about it, Gabriella," he said, "but honestly I am out of the money.