“Thank the Lord for you women,” he said. “You do not forget that there are stars and sky above the city smoke. If it were not for you and your kind, I’m afraid most of the world would be tied to the ground like serfs.”
“Oh, I fancy nature has liberated a few of you, and I am glad to believe that Dick is among the free,” she said.
She sat beside Dick, but she turned from him and spoke to Mr. Lenox. When Percival, softened by her words and the tone of belief in which they were spoken, looked up, he saw, not her eyes, but, across the table, those of Lena, big and sympathetic. As he gazed into them he saw all of Madeline’s confidence in him, all of Madeline’s ideals, but the more spiritual, the more feminine, because they were unspoken. Lena’s eyes were eloquent even if she was silent; internally she was really resenting Madeline’s tone, which seemed to her to assume that Dick was somehow Miss Elton’s particular property. “Perhaps you needn’t be so sure, missy,” she thought.
“You look like incarnate song” Page 199
After dinner, when the three men found their way to the drawing-room, Mrs. Lenox had started Madeline on a career of song. She was already in the midst of a curious weird Roumanian thing, and Norris made straight for the piano. Lena, ethereal in pale blue, was sympathetically listening to perfection. She had lost her look of incongruity with her surroundings. The dreamy eyes and the transparent skin found their setting in her filmy gown and the rich soft light. Dick drew in his breath. He seemed never to get used to her. Naturally he found a seat near her. She was his protégée.
“Don’t you sing, Miss Quincy?” was his inevitable query.
And she replied with inward anguish, “Not at all.”
“But I’m sure you do. You look like incarnate song,” he persisted. “You’re playing modest.”