At seventy-two, Pauline Attenborough could still sometimes be mistaken, in the half-light, for thirty. She really was a wonderfully-preserved woman, of perfect chic³. Of course it helps a great deal to have the right frame. She would be an exquisite⁴ skeleton, and her skull⁵ would be an exquisite skull, like that of some Etruscan woman with feminine charm still in the swerve⁶ of the bone and the pretty, na?ve teeth.

Mrs Attenborough’s face was of the perfect oval and slightly flat type that wears best. There is no flesh to sag⁷. Her nose rode serenely⁸, in its finely-bridged curve. Only the big grey eyes were a tiny bit prominent, on the surface of her face, and they gave her away most. The bluish lids were heavy, as if they ached sometimes with the strain of keeping the eyes beneath them arch and bright; and at the corners of the eyes were fine little wrinkles which would slacken into haggardness, then be pulled up tense again to that bright, gay look like a Leonardo woman who really could laugh outright¹⁰.

Her niece Cecilia was perhaps the only person in the world who was aware of the invisible little wire which connected Pauline’s eye-wrinkles with Pauline’s willpower. Only Cecilia consciously watched the eyes go haggard and old and tired, and remain so, for hours; until Robert came home. Then ping! — the mysterious little wire that worked between Pauline’s will and her face went taut¹¹, the weary, haggard, prominent eyes suddenly began to gleam, the eyelids¹² arched, the queer, curved eyebrows¹³ which floated in such

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