“Don’t make us out all alike,” pleaded his sister with a laugh. “There are still a few old-fashioned papers that do give their opponents fair play.” Joan had no appointment till the afternoon. They drove out to St. Germain, and had déjeuner at a small restaurant opposite the Château; and afterwards they strolled on to the terrace.!

“Fifteen years,” she answered. “I was a bit older than ’im. But I’ve never looked my age, they tell me. Lord, what a boy ’e was! Swept you off your feet, like. ’E wasn’t the only one. I’d got a way with me, I suppose. Anyhow, the men seemed to think so. There was always a few ’anging about. Like flies round a ’oney-pot, Mother used to say.” She giggled. “But ’e wouldn’t take No for an answer. And I didn’t want to give it ’im, neither. I was gone on ’im, right enough. No use saying I wasn’t.” It ended in Joan’s promising to introduce her to discreet theatrical friends who would tell her of cosmetics less injurious to the skin, and advise her generally in the ancient and proper art of “making up.”

“No,” she whispered. “Of course not. I don’t like your tie.” It seemed to depress him, that. “I guess I’m spoiling yours, too,” he answered. “I’m not worth it. I might have done something to win you and keep you. I’m not going to do much without you.” One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.