A sudden fit of coughing seized her, and while she shook with it Camelia came in. Mary’s coughing irritated Camelia, but she did not want to hurt her feelings by departing before it after getting the newspaper she had come for, so, walking to the table, she said, taking up and opening the Times with a large rustling—
“All alone, Mary?”
“Yes,” Mary replied. The coughing left her, and she clenched her handkerchief in her hand. The madness rose again, lit by a keener sense of horror.
“But Mr. Perior came in, did he not?” Camelia scanned the columns, her back to the light.
“Yes,” Mary repeated.
“Well, what did he have to say?” Camelia felt her tone to be satisfactorily detached. She wanted to know. That sense of something lacking, something even awkward, had become almost acute this morning; only her quiet gaiety had bridged it over. Mary was again looking out of the window. An inner impulsion made her say in a tone as dull as her look—
“He said he was dreary.”
The Times rustled with a somewhat aggressive effect of absorption, and then Camelia laid it down. Something in Mary’s voice angered her; it implied a sympathy from which she was to be shut out; he had not said to her that he was dreary. But she still kept her tone very light as she walked to the fire.
“Well, he is always that—is he not?” she commented, holding out a foot to the blaze; “a very glum person indeed is my good Alceste.”
Mary did not reply, and Camelia, with a quick turn of conjecture that seemed to cut her, wondered if there had been further confidences. She paused for a moment, swallowed on a rising tremor of apprehension, before saying, as she turned her back to the fire and faced the figure at the table—the figure’s heavy uncouthness of attitude making her a little angrier—“What further moans did my melancholy friend pour into your sympathetic bosom, Mary?” Mary, looking steadily out of the window, felt the flame rising.