the wife of Callendar than to have dried up in the pale, shriveled fashion of Janey and Margaret (and they had been pretty once, in a silly, pink and white fashion). And she knew, with a curious pang of pity, that as they stood there in the shadow of their powerful mother, they too were thinking the same thing. They had never escaped that dowdy, stupid old woman. . . .
"Good night," she said. "I shan't see you again. I am sailing on Friday."
And then for the first time in her life, the wall of cold common sense collapsed and she exposed herself deliberately to the peril of boredom. "If you do decide to come to Paris, Janey, you must pay me a visit." For there was something unbearable to her in the thought of Janey, free for the first time from the dominion of her mother, alone in Paris. It would be like a bird set free which no longer knows how to fly. . . .
In the darkness Janey stammered and gushed like a girl of seventeen (Janey who would never see forty again), "It's kind of you, Sabine. It's wonderful. You see I've never been in Paris before without mother . . . and I wouldn't know just what to do . . . I'll come." And she subsided into a chaos of maidenly gurglings.
But as Sabine drove away from the barren shadows of the Cedars, she reproached herself for having succumbed so weakly. Something had happened to her. A year ago she would not have done such a stupid thing. . . . "Perhaps," she thought, above the distant roar of the surf, "I am growing old. . . ."
As the months passed and she returned to Paris—a Paris gay and gaudy with the excitement of the last days of the peace conference—she came to understand the satisfaction which lies of knowing that a thing is finished. She would no longer go through the torture of seeing Callendar day after day, always at hand and yet remote as the summit of a cold mountain peak. All that was over, finished; and in the sense of finality there was peace. Until now she had never known how terribly the monstrous house in
