She wore a mauve negligee that was sheer and soft and flowing, and her burnt-gold hair was braided and wound around her head in a picturesque and becoming coiffure.

As she turned the pages of the little book the Major noticed her hands.  They were white and slender, and she wore only one ring—­a long amethyst set in silver.

“Do you play?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes.  Why?”

“Your hands show it.”

She smiled at him.  “I am afraid that my hands don’t quite tell the truth.”  She held them up so that the light of the lamp shone through them.  “They are really a musician’s hands, aren’t they?  And I am only a dabbler in that as in everything else.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that.”

“But I am.  I have intelligence.  But I’m a ‘dunce with wits.’  I know what I ought to do but I don’t do it.  I think that I have brains enough to write, I am sure I have imagination enough to paint, I have strength enough when I am well to”—­she laughed,—­“scrub floors.  But I don’t write or play or paint—­or scrub floors—­I don’t believe that there is one thing in the world that I can do as well as Mary Flippin makes biscuits.”

Her eyes seemed to challenge him to deny her assertion.  He settled himself lazily in his chair, and asked about the book.

“Tell me why you like Dickens, when nobody reads him in these days except ourselves.”

“I like him because in my next incarnation I want to live in the kind of world he writes about.”

He was much interested.  “You do?”

She nodded.  “Yes.  I never have.  My world has always been—­cut and dried, conventional, you know the kind.”  The slender hand with the amethyst ring made a little gesture of disdain.  “There were three of us, my mother and my father and myself.  Everything in our lives was very perfectly ordered.  We were not very rich—­not in the modern sense, and we were not very poor, and we knew a lot of nice people.  I went to school with girls of my own kind, an exclusive school.  I went away summers to our own cottage in an exclusive North Shore colony.  We took our servants with us.  After my mother died I went to boarding-school, and to Europe in summer, and when my school days were ended, and I acquired a stepmother, I set up an apartment of my own.  It has Florentine things in it, and Byzantine things, and things from China and Japan, and the colors shine like jewels under my lamps—­you know the effect.  And my kitchen is all in white enamel, and the cook does things by electricity, and when I go away in summer my friends have Italian villas—­like the Watermans, on the North Shore, although all of my friends are not like the Watermans.”  She threw this last out casually, not as a criticism, but that he might, it seemed, withhold judgment of her present choice of associates.  “And I have never known the world of good cheer that Dickens writes about—­wide kitchens, and teakettles