“I know; I quite understand,” she murmured; and her hands, coming, as it were, slowly to life, began to pick at the little cloth buttons of the braided jacket she wore over her satin gown. The stiffness of these old-fashioned garments seemed to hold her up. Without their support it looked as if she would have fallen down just where she was⁠—close to the newspaper buried through the nervousness of Mr. Smith!

She seemed to Wolf, as he stood helplessly before her, like a classic image of outrage in grotesque modern clothes. “She’s like an elderly Io,” he thought, “driven mad by the gadfly of the goddess.”