She forced a laugh. “Oh, I only persuaded him to do what he had made up his mind to do,” she explained. “It was all settled.” Suddenly, and intensely to her own surprise, she fell into a passionate fit of weeping. There was no reason for it, and it was altogether so unlike her. But for quite a while she was unable to control it. Gradually, and of their own accord, her sobs lessened, and she was able to wipe her eyes and take stock of herself in the long glass. She wondered for the moment whether it was really her own reflection that she saw there or that of some ghostly image of her mother. She had so often seen the same look in her mother’s eyes. Evidently the likeness between them was more extensive than she had imagined. For the first time she became conscious of an emotional, hysterical side to her nature of which she had been unaware. Perhaps it was just as well that she had discovered it. She would have to keep a stricter watch upon herself. This question of her future relationship with Phillips: it would have to be thought out coldly, dispassionately. Nothing unexpected must be allowed to enter into it.!

“Hullo!” she said. “Are you two concluding a bargain?” He led the way to the piano. “Tell Madge I want her,” he whispered. He struck a few notes; and then in a voice that drowned every other sound in the room, struck up a comic song.

“I know,” whispered Joan. “I’ve been there, too. I knew you were doing it, though I didn’t quite know how—till the other day. I wouldn’t think. I wanted to pretend that I didn’t. I know all you can say. I’ve been listening to it. It was right of you to want to give it all up to me for his sake. But it would be wrong of me to take it. I don’t quite see why. I can’t explain it. But I mustn’t. So you see it would be no good.” “Thanks,” he answered. “I may ask you to later on. But just now—” He paused. “But why should you give up your art?” persisted Joan. It was that was sticking in her mind. “I should have thought that, if only for the sake of the child, you would have gone on with it.”