When Gordon came in, she didn’t look up. Behind her mirrored image his face floated into view like something conjured up into a crystal ball-but familiar, wearing its old look of fond anxiety.

He was a very handsome man, Gordon. He’d be forty on his next birthday; and he was as alarmed, and as amused at his own alarm, as any pretty woman would be at the onset of that ominous day. The years had only added to his good looks-a brush of white at the temples, stark and distinctive against his thick black hair, a deepening of the lines of laughter that fanned out from the corners of his eyes. A man with eyes like that oughtn’t to look so masculine; they were big and dark and luminous, fringed with lashes so long and thick they looked artificial. But there was nothing in the least effeminate about Gordon’s face-or mind, or body.

Next to his, her own face was wraithlike. Too pale, too thin, with suggestive dark circles under the eyes and an undue prominence of certain muscles. Those long tendons in the throat especially-the throat he had admired, had compared with that of the lovely statue of Nefertiti…

She turned her head, watching the effect, and her pale mouth, as yet unpainted for public appearance, writhed distastefully as the lines tightened and drew. Gordon’s mouth moved. She raised her eyes to meet his mirrored eyes, and felt herself frowning.

“What?”

“I said,” he repeated patiently, “that we have a guest for dinner, and the weekend. So look your loveliest, won’t you? If you are to be immortalized, I want it to be as you really are.”