"Yes ... she's beautiful ... but I bet she's an icicle when Morry's blazing...."
Why she thought this, she could not have said. But she felt sure of it. And it comforted her. She was so convinced of her "right" to Morris that she regarded Sophy, not exactly as a wilful thief, but as a receiver of stolen goods. Morris had stolen himself from her (Belinda), in a manner of speaking, and Sophy had accepted this gift which he had no right to make. Belinda was fair-minded. It was not Sophy's fault, because though she had received stolen goods she had received them unwittingly. Morris was the culprit. Belinda had long solaced herself with the thought of how delightful would be the task of meting him his just punishment. Now she looked at Sophy and wondered. She was wondering how this strain of coldness that she felt in her rival affected Morry. And she clenched herself against Sophy's beauty; for she did not belittle it, though she thought it cold. But she had no real fear of it. Was she not eighteen and this woman thirty-two—or nearly thirty-two? Belinda felt youth to her hand like a bright sword. For two years she had been muttering as she fell asleep, and as she waked: "Morry shall divorce her and marry me." That kiss had sealed her his, and made him hers. She was unusual in that she was lawless in method, but worked to law-abiding ends.
She had not the least idea of throwing her cap over the windmill for Morry. She meant to keep house with him in the windmill and pay all proper taxes on the grist it ground for them. It would be hard to find a more determined character than Belinda. She had the sort of will that decides to accomplish an object without bothering in the least about ways and means. She had, as it were, the religion of the Will. She would be inspired, she felt sure, in just the right way at just the right moment. She had the faith that not only counts on removing mountains into the sea, but depends on the sea's extinguishing them if they chance to be volcanoes and their peaks left unsubmerged.
She thought of her own passionate love for Morris as a sea into which many mountains might be cast and overwhelmed. There would come the destined moment—the tidal wave would rush gloriously inland. All would be swept clear—a bare, clean space whereon she would build their palace of delights.
Belinda was one of the women-children who are born knowing things. She came of Lilith rather than of Eve. She had no low curiosities, because from the beginning she seemed to have been aware of everything. A wise Brahman looking on her would have seen the latest incarnation of some fearless Courtesan, destined in this particular existence to aspire to the domestication of her lawlessness. For some past deed of mercy on her part, the Lords of Karma had decreed that in this life respectability should be the modest guiding-star of her wayward feet. For though Belinda would always be in spirit her lover's mistress, she had no faintest idea of being other than his wife in the eyes of the world.
So she looked at Sophy, and wondered how much she really loved Morry. She was sorry for her, in a way, but this emotion of indulgent compassion did not render her a whit less implacable.
And Sophy, observing her closely, tried to analyse the strange effect that the girl had upon her. She felt a powerful force emanating from the whole scintillant young figure—yet she felt as strongly that, for her at least, Belinda had not "charm."
But then Belinda did not have charm for other women. She was essentially, from her cradle, the type of "man's woman" in one of its completest forms. Not the Griselda type, but the type that led Antony to set sail after the fleet of Egypt.
Loring had been right when he called Belinda a "kitten Cleopatra."
She was one of nature's perfectly amoral and shameless triumphs—la femme courtisane flung out as rounded and complete as a golden bubble on the wind of destiny.