"Not if he doesn't care for his wife?" the master torturer proceeded, more and more at ease now she saw how tight she had him.
Choate turned upon her. His pale face was scarred with an emotion as deep as the source of tears, though she exulted to see he had no tears to show her. Men should, she felt, be strong.
"Don't you know you mustn't say that kind of thing to me?" he asked her. "Don't you see it's a temptation? I can't listen to it. I can't consider it for a minute."
"Is it a temptation?" she asked, in a whisper, born, it seemed, of unacknowledged intimacies between them. The whisper said, "If it is a temptation, it is not a temptation to you alone."
Choate was not looking at her, but he saw her, with the eyes of the mind: the brown limpid look, the uplift of her quivering face, the curve of her throat and the long ripple to her feet. He walked out of the room; it was the only thing for a decent man to do, in the face of incarnate appeal, challenge, a vitality so intense, and yet so unconscious of itself, he knew, that it was, in its purity, almost irresistible. In the street he was deaf to the call of a friend and passed another without seeing him. They chaffed him about it afterward. He was, they told him, thinking of a case.
Esther went about the house in an exhilarated lightness. She sang a little, in a formless way. She could not manage a tune, but she had a rhythmic style of humming that was not unpleasant to hear and gave her occasional outlet. It was the animal in the desert droning and purring to itself in excess of ease. She felt equal to meeting Aunt Patricia even.
About dusk Aunt Patricia came in the mediæval cab with Denny driving. There was no luggage. Esther hoped a great deal from that. But it proved there was too much to come by cab, and Denny brought it afterward, shabby trunks of a sophisticated look, spattered with labels. Madame Beattie alighted from the cab, a large woman in worn black velvet, with a stale perfume about her. Esther was at the door to meet her, and even in this outer air she could hardly help putting up her nose a little at the exotic smell. Madame Beattie was swarthy and strong-featured with a soft wrinkled skin unnatural from over-cherishing. She had bright, humorously satirical eyes; and her mouth was large. Therefore you were surprised at her slight lisp, a curious childishness which Esther had always considered pure affectation. She had forgotten it in these later years, but now the sound of it awakened all the distaste and curiosity she had felt of old. She had always believed if Aunt Patricia spoke out, the lisp would go. The voice underneath the lisp was a sad thing when you remembered it had once been "golden ". It was raucous yet husky, a gin voice, Jeffrey had called it, adding that she had a gin cough. All this Esther remembered as she went forward prettily and submitted to Aunt Patricia's perfumed kiss. The ostrich feathers in the worn velvet travelling hat cascaded over them both, and bangles clinked in a thin discord with curious trinkets hanging from her chatelaine. Evidently the desire to hold her niece in her arms had been for telegraphic purposes only.
When they had gone in and Aunt Patricia was removing her gloves and accepting tea—she said she would not take her hat off until she went upstairs—she asked, with a cheerful boldness:
"Where's your husband?"
Esther shrank perceptibly. No one but Lydia had felt at liberty to pelt her with the incarcerated husband, and she was not only sensitive in fact but from an intuition of the prettiest thing to do.