Then, after a pause, she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner.
"A wrinkle would kill me," she pursued; "I'd rather endure any agony--I'd be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about.
Yet they must come--they're obliged to come in fifteen--ten--perhaps in five years.

Perhaps even to-morrow.

Do you suppose," she questioned abruptly, with a tragic intensity worthy of a less ignoble cause, "that when one gets old one really ceases to mind--that one dies out all inside--the sensations I mean, and the emotions--before the husk begins to wither ?" She paused a moment, but as Laura continued to regard her with a soft, compassionate look she turned away again and, touching an electric button in the wall, flooded the room with light.

The change was so startling that every object seemed to leap at once from twilight vagueness into a conspicuous prominence.

On a chair in the corner was carelessly flung a white chiffon dinner gown, and a pair of little satin slippers had been thrown upon the floor beside it, where they lay slightly sideways, with turned-out toes, as they had fallen from the wearer's feet.