April 30th.
　　"Preposterous¹!" said Lady Tressilian. She drew herself up on her pillow and glared fiercely round the room.
　　"Absolutely preposterous! Nevile must be mad." "It does seem rather odd," said Mary Aldin.
　　Lady Tressilian had a striking-looking profile with a slender bridged nose, down which, when so inclined, she could look with telling effect. Though now over seventy and in frail² health, her native vigour³ of mind was in no way impaired⁴. She had, it is true, long periods of retreat from life and its emotions when she would lie with half-closed eyes, but from these semi-comas she would emerge with all her faculties⁵ sharpened to the uttermost, and with an incisive⁶ tongue. Propped⁷ up by pillows in a large bed set across one corner of her room, she held her court like some French Queen. Mary Aldin, a distant cousin, lived with her and looked after her. The two women got on together excellently. Mary was thirty-six, but had one of those smooth ageless faces that change little with passing years. She might have been thirty or forty-five. She had a good figure, an air of breeding, and dark hair to which one lock of white across the front gave a touch of individuality. It was at one time a fashion, but Mary's white lock of hair was natural and she had had it since her girlhood.
　　She looked down now reflectively at Nevile Strange's letter, which Lady Tressilian had handed to her.
　　"Yes," she said. "It does seem rather odd.""You can't tell me," said Lady Tressilian, "that this is Nevile's own idea! Somebody put it into his head. Probably that new wife of his.""Kay. You think it was Kay's idea?"
　　"It would be quite like her. New and vulgar. If husbands and wives have to advertise their difficulties in public and have recourse to divorce, then they might at least part decently. The new wife and the old wife making friends is quite disgusting, to my mind. Nobody has any standards nowadays!""I suppose it is just the modern way," said Mary.

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