The beauty looked at her, it seemed as if with a kind of lofty recognition in her eyes; but there she was, as always.

She turned the light upon the pale face of the martyr-portrait.

It looked troubled and faded, as it seemed to Myrtle, but still it was the same face she remembered from her childhood.

Then she threw the light on the old chair, and, shuddering, caught up a shawl and flung it over the spiral-wound arms and legs, and the flattened reptiles on which it stood.
In those dead hours of the night which had passed over her sitting there, still and stony, as it should seem, she had had strange visitors.
Two women had been with her, as real as any that breathed the breath of life,--so it appeared to her,--yet both had long been what is called, in our poor language, dead.

One came in all the glory of her ripened beauty, bare-necked, bare-armed, full dressed by nature in that splendid animal equipment which in its day had captivated the eyes of all the lusty lovers of complete muliebrity.