Scheherazade by Florence Warden

A night, and a day, and a night, and a day, and again a night passed during which time George heard nothing more of his ministering angel or her promised comfort. Then on the second day his door opened, and a lady to see him was announced. The few instants which elapsed before she appeared were more intensely exciting to him than the pause before the judge pronounces sentence is to the prisoner. It was not Ella; she would have been in like a sparrow before the announcement was well out of the warder's mouth. His suspense did not last a half-minute. With slow and hesitating steps a woman entered, oddly dressed in garments that were obviously never intended to be worn together; a shabby old grey flannel dressing-gown with scraps of torn lace trailing along the floor behind her, an opera-cloak of light brown satin embroidered in gold thread bordered with sable-tails and fastened by a brooch of sapphires, a battered black bonnet and a lace veil as thick as a mask, formed a costume so grotesque that at the first moment George failed to recognise in the odd figure the luxurious and once daintily dressed Chloris White.

The change in her, when she took off her veil as the warder retreated, was even more striking: it appalled George, who had not had enough experience of women of her class and their dismal vagaries to understand this ghastly but common metamorphosis of the beauty of one day to the hag of the next. He had thought in the glare of the sunlight, that afternoon when he had carried her off to the boat, that the liberal daubing of pink and white and black made her beautiful face hideous; now, as she sat, heedless of her appearance, in the full light of the little barred window, her face as innocent of paint as his own, though not so clean, looked, in its withered yellowness, with its sunken eyes and vicious furrows, so inexpressibly uncanny and revolting, that he was forced to acknowledge the wisdom of a practice which disguised in some measure the ugly traces of base thoughts and foul deeds. He had seen her first in all the pride of her vogue, of her success in the career she had chosen; now he saw her in the alternate mood of a degradation, a self-abandonment, a wretchedness, which mocked the possessor of treasures which would have made an art-museum rich, and of jewels and furs which now only served, the former to enhance the weird hideousness of her sallow skin, the latter to emphasise the slovenliness of her attire.