He looked discreetly away as he spoke, but he noticed that she stirred at this point.
"Not only your heart and your womanly yearnings are at stake here, Miss Delarayne," he pursued. "These when they are thwarted simply make one sweetly miserable, languorously self-commiserating,—but it is your pride and vanity that are concerned."
She regarded him now as one magnetised, hypnotised, petrified.
If every line of his face, and every sign in his whole person had not convinced her of his exceptional character, she would have fled his presence even now, never to confront him again.
"These are real savages when they are provoked," he went on suavely. "What do they care for the destruction their anger brings upon your body? They would devastate your whole beauty without scruple in order to calm their tempestuous rage. They begin by undermining the trust you feel in your own claims. They then proceed to keep you awake at night and to toss you about in your bed, when you ought to be refreshing your body with sleep; and, finally, when they have ravished your sleep, they open your mind to all the hideous spectres and shapes that are always waiting, like hungry unemployed, to get busy in a wakeful and anxious brain."
"Lord Henry!" gasped the girl, starting as if to rise.
"I am saying these things for you, Miss Delarayne," he said quickly, "because it is perhaps too much to expect you to say them yourself, and because you will find that their expression will relieve you. Oh, if I can only do that,—surely——"
She looked at him for a moment and noted the fervour in his face, the energy in his hands, and the honest nobility of his eyes; and anxious as she now felt to escape from his terrifying presence, she was riveted by his personality and could not move.
"It was not only the prospect of having all your life to stroke the cheeks of other people's children, Miss Delarayne, that you dreaded. This is a natural, noble, splendid dread, it is true, which every woman worthy of the name should feel when she reaches your age. But there is something far more poisonous, far more harmful to your system in the present situation, and that is the thought that you may have all your life to stroke the cheeks of other people's children, thanks to a creature who, delightful as she may be, you nevertheless rightly regard not only as your subordinate, not only as your junior both in age and claims, but also as one towards whom it is loathsome to you to feel any such feelings as rivalry."
Cleopatra gripped the arms of her wicker chair, and turned eyes full of horror upon her companion.