To Irene fell the privilege every evening of brushing her aunt's hair. For her these midnight moments were the most precious in the day. True, it was sometimes an agony for her to keep awake and the suppression of yawns was always painful; three years of incessant practice had not yet accustomed her to her Aunt Lilian's late hours. Aunt Lilian used to twit her sometimes on her childish longing for sleep; at other times she used to insist, very solicitously, that Irene should rest after lunch and go to bed at ten. The teasing made Irene feel ashamed of her babyishness; the solicitude made her protest that she wasn't a baby, that she was never tired and could easily do with five or six hours' sleep a night. The important thing, she had found, was not to be seen yawning by Aunt Lilian and always to look fresh and lively. If Aunt Lilian noticed nothing there was neither teasing nor solicitude.

But in any case, every inconvenience was paid for a thousand times by the delights of these confidential conversations in front of the dressing-table mirror. While the young girl brushed and brushed away at the long tresses of pale golden-brown hair, Mrs. Aldwinkle, her eyes shut, and with an expression of beatitude on her face--for she took a cat's pleasure in the brushing--would talk, spasmodically, in broken sentences, of the events of the day, of her guests, of the people they had met; or of her own past, of plans for the future--hers or Irene's--of love. On all these subjects Mrs. Aldwinkle spoke intimately, confidentially, without reserve. Feeling that she was being treated by her Aunt Lilian as entirely grown-up and almost as an equal, Irene was proud and grateful. Without deliberately setting out to complete the subjugation of her niece, Mrs. Aldwinkle had discovered, in those midnight conversations, the most perfect means for achieving this end. If she talked like this to Irene, it was merely because she felt the need of talking intimately to some one, and because there was nobody else to talk to. Incidentally, however, she had contrived in the process to make the girl her slave. Made her Aunt Lilian's confidante, invested, so to speak, with a title of honour, Irene felt a gratitude which strengthened her original childish attachment to her aunt.

Meanwhile, she had learned to talk with an airy familiarity of many things concerning which young girls are supposed to be ignorant, and of which, indeed, she herself knew, except intellectually and at second hand, nothing. She had learned to be knowing and worldly wise, in the void, so to speak, and with no personal knowledge of the world. Gravely, ingenuously, she would say things that could only be uttered out of the depths of the profoundest innocence, amplifying and making embarrassingly explicit in public things that Mrs. Aldwinkle had only fragmentarily hinted at in the confidential small hours. She regarded herself as immensely mature.

To-night Mrs. Aldwinkle was in a rather gloomy, complaining mood.

'I'm getting old,' she said, sighing, and opening her eyes for a moment to look at her image in the glass that confronted her. The image did not deny the statement. 'And yet I always feel so young.'

'That's what really matters,' Irene declared. 'And besides, it's nonsense; you're not old; you don't look old.' In Irene's eyes, moreover, she really didn't look old.

'People don't like one any more when one gets old,' Mrs. Aldwinkle continued. 'Friends are terribly faithless. They fall away.' She sighed. 'When I think of all the friends...' She left the sentence unfinished.

All her life long Mrs. Aldwinkle had had a peculiar genius for breaking with her friends and lovers. Mr. Cardan was almost the sole survivor from an earlier generation of friends. From all the rest she had parted, and she had parted with a light heart. It had seemed easy to her, when she was younger, to make new friends in place of the old. Potential friends, she thought, were to be found everywhere, every day. But now she was beginning to doubt whether the supply was, after all, so inexhaustible as she had once supposed. People of her own age, she found, were already set fast in the little social worlds they had made for themselves. And people of the younger generation seemed to find it hard to believe that she felt, in her heart, just as young as they did. They mostly treated her with the rather distant politeness which one accords to a stranger and an elder person.

'I think people are horrid,' said Irene, giving a particularly violent sweep with the hair-brush to emphasize her indignation.

'You won't be faithless?' asked Mrs. Aldwinkle.

Irene bent over and, for all answer, kissed her on the forehead. Mrs. Aldwinkle opened her glittering blue eyes and looked up at her, smiling, as she did so, that siren smile that, for Irene, was still as fascinating as it had ever been.

'If only everybody were like my little Irene!' Mrs. Aldwinkle let her head fall forward and once more closed her eyes. There was a silence. 'What are you sighing about in that heart-breaking way?' she suddenly asked.

Irene's blush ran tingling up into her temples and disappeared under the copper-coloured fringe. 'Oh, nothing,' she said, with an off-handedness that expressed the depth of her guilty embarrassment. That deep intake of breath, that brief and passionate expiry were not the components of a sigh. She had been yawning with her mouth shut.

But Mrs. Aldwinkle, with her bias towards the romantic, did not suspect the truth. 'Nothing, indeed!' she echoed incredulously. 'Why, it was the noise of the wind blowing through the cracks of a broken heart. I never heard such a sigh.' She looked at the reflection of Irene's face in the mirror. 'And you're blushing like a peony. What is it?'

'But it's nothing, I tell you,' Irene declared, speaking almost in a tone of irritation. She was annoyed with herself for having yawned so ineptly and blushed so pointlessly, rather than with her aunt. She immersed herself more than ever deeply in her brushing, hoping and praying that Mrs. Aldwinkle would drop the subject.

But Mrs. Aldwinkle was implacable in her tactlessness. 'I never heard anything that sounded so love-sick,' she said, smiling archly into the looking-glass. Mrs. Aldwinkle's humorous sallies had a way of falling ponderously, like bludgeon strokes, on the objects of her raillery. One never knew, when she was being sprightly, whether to feel sorrier for the victim or for Mrs. Aldwinkle herself. For though the victim might get hard knocks, the spectacle of Mrs. Aldwinkle laboriously exerting herself to deliver them was sadly ludicrous; one wished, for her sake, for the sake of the whole human race, that she would desist. But she never did. Mrs. Aldwinkle always carried all her jokes to the foreseen end, and generally far further than was foreseeable by any one less ponderously minded than herself. 'It was like a whale sighing!' she went on with a frightful playfulness. 'It must be a grand passion of the largest size. Who is it? Who is it?' She raised her eyebrows, she smiled with what seemed to her, as she studied it in the glass, a most wickedly sly but charming smile--like a smile in a comedy by Congreve, it occurred to her.

'But, Aunt Lilian,' protested Irene, almost in despair, almost in tears, 'it was nothing, I tell you.' At moments like this she could almost find it in her to hate Aunt Lilian. 'As a matter of fact, I was only...' She was going to blurt it out courageously; she was just going to tell Aunt Lilian--at the risk of a teasing or an almost equally unwelcome solicitude: either were better than this--that she had been merely yawning. But Mrs. Aldwinkle, still relentlessly pursuing her fun, interrupted her.

'But I guess who it is,' she said, wagging a forefinger at the glass. 'I guess. I'm not such a blind stupid old auntie as you think. You imagine I haven't noticed. Silly child! Did she think I didn't see that he was very assiduous and that she rather liked it? Did she think her stupid old auntie was blind?'

Irene blushed again; the tears came into her eyes. 'But who are you talking about?' she said in a voice that she had to make a great effort to keep from breaking and trembling out of control.

'What an innocent!' mocked Mrs. Aldwinkle, still very Congreve. And at this point--earlier than was usual with her on these occasions--she had mercy and consented to put poor Irene out of her agony. 'Why, Hovenden,' she said. 'Who else should it be?'

'Hovenden?' Irene repeated with genuine surprise.

'Injured innocence!' Mrs. Aldwinkle momentarily renewed her trampling fun. 'But it's sufficiently obvious,' she went on in a more natural voice. 'The poor boy follows you like a dog.'

'Me?' Irene had been too much preoccupied in following her Aunt Lilian to notice that she in her turn was being followed.

'Now don't pretend,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle. 'It's so stupid pretending. Much better to be frank and straightforward. Admit, now, that you like him.'

Irene admitted. 'Yes, of course I like him. But not... not in any special way. I'd really not thought of him like that.'

A shade contemptuously, benevolently amused, Mrs. Aldwinkle smiled. She forgot her depression, forgot her causes of personal complaint against the universal order of things. Absorbed in the uniquely interesting subject, in the sole and proper study of mankind, she was once more happy. Love--it was the only thing. Even Art, compared with it, hardly existed. Mrs. Aldwinkle was almost as much interested in other people's love as in her own. She wanted every one to love, constantly and complicatedly. She liked to bring people together, to foster tender feelings, to watch the development of passion, to assist--when it happened; and Mrs. Aldwinkle was always rather disappointed when it did not--at the tragic catastrophe. And then, when the first love, growing old, had lingeringly or violently died, there was the new love to think of, to arrange, to foster, to watch; and then the third, the fourth.... One must always follow the spontaneous motions of the heart; it is the divine within us that stirs in the heart. And one must worship Eros so reverently that one can never be content with anything but the most poignant, most passionate manifestations of his power. To be content with a love that has turned in the course of time to mere affection, kindliness and quiet comprehension is almost to blaspheme against the name of Eros. Your true lover, thought Mrs. Aldwinkle, leaves the old, paralytic love and turns whole-heartedly to the young passion.

'What a goose you are!' said Mrs. Aldwinkle. 'I sometimes wonder,' she went on, 'whether you're capable of being in love at all, you're so uncomprehending, so cold.'

Irene protested with all the energy of which she was capable. One could not have lived as long as she had in Mrs. Aldwinkle's company without regarding the imputation of coldness, of insensitiveness to passion, as the most damning of all possible impeachments. It was better to be accused of being a murderess--particularly if it were a case of crime passionnel. 'I don't know how you say that,' she said indignantly. 'I'm always in love.' Had there not been Peter, and Jacques, and Mario?

'You may think you have,' said Mrs. Aldwinkle contemptuously, forgetting that it was she herself who had persuaded Irene that she was in love. 'But it was more imagination than the real thing. Some women are born like that.' She shook her head. 'And they die like that.' One might have inferred from Mrs. Aldwinkle's words and the tone of her voice that Irene was a superannuated spinster of forty, proved conclusively, after twenty years of accumulated evidence, to be incapable of anything remotely resembling an amorous passion.

Irene made no answer, but went on brushing her aunt's hair. Mrs. Aldwinkle's aspersions were particularly wounding to her. She wished that she could do something startling to prove their baselessness. Something spectacular.

'And I've always thought Hovenden an extremely nice boy,' Mrs. Aldwinkle continued, with the air of pursuing an argument. She talked on. Irene listened and went on brushing.