Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance--words without passion, acts without abandonment.

At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the chest, which her mirror revealed to her.

The period was full of woman's advancement--a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her--yet she had taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved.

She had read countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister who had petitioned merely for the privilege to love.

The modern heroine could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to.