"To Jeff, anyway. Madame Beattie says so."
"Do you think for a moment she was telling you the truth?"
"But that's just the kind of women they are," said Lydia, at once reckless and astute. "Esther's just the woman to take a necklace, and Madame Beattie's just the woman to tell you she's taken it."
"Miss Lydia," said Choate gravely, "I'm bound to warn you in advance that you mustn't draw that kind of inference."
Lydia lost her temper. It seemed to her she had been talking plain fact.
"I shall draw all the inferences I please," said she, "especially if they're true. And you needn't try to mix me up by your law terms, for I don't understand them."
"I have been particularly careful not to," said Choate rather stiffly; but still, she saw, with an irritating proffer of compassion for her because she didn't know any better. "I am being very unprofessional indeed. And I still advise you, in plain language, not to draw that sort of inference about a lady—" There he hesitated.
"About Esther?" she inquired viciously.
"Yes," said he steadily, "about Mrs. Jeffrey Blake. She is a gentlewoman."
So Anne had said: "Esther is a lady." For the moment Lydia felt more imbued with the impartiality of the law than both of them. Esther's being a lady had, she thought, nothing whatever to do with her stealing a necklace, if she happened to like necklaces. She considered herself a lady, but she could also see herself, under temptation, doing a desperado's deeds. Not stealing a necklace: that was tawdry larceny. But she could see herself trapping Esther in a still place and cutting her dusky hair off so that she'd betray no more men. For she began to suspect that Alston Choate, too, was caught in the lure of Esther's inexplicable charm. Lydia was at the moment of girlhood nearly done where her accumulated experience, half of it not understood, was prepared to spring to life and crystallise into clearest knowledge. She was a child still, but she was ready to be a woman. Alston Choate now was gazing at her with his charming smile, and Lydia hardened under it, certain the smile was meant for mere persuasiveness.