"Who's Baby?" Lord Henry interrupted.
"My sister, Leonetta."
"Oh, I see—go on."
"Then you do everything you can to make her feel she is not grown up yet. But it is hopeless. In vain you try to thrust her back into childhood——"
"By calling her 'Baby' instead of 'Leonetta,' for instance," said Lord Henry.
"Oh, of course!" Cleopatra cried. "I didn't think of that." Then she continued after a while, "But of course they want to shine, and you can do nothing. You are expected to love them, cherish them; you are even expected to take an interest in their clothes, in their hair! You even have to go and help put the finishing touches, when all the time you dread seeing her dressed up. It is excruciating, it is brutal. It is inhuman, Lord Henry! Shall I tell you the truth,—though it's dreadful, wicked. Well, I hate my sister. I loathe her with a deadly loathing. My fingers itch to—oh, all through the night I think of some means of disfiguring her. It is the most diabolical cruelty to put any woman into the position I am in now. I long to fly away, where I shall never, never see her again. It's that and nothing else that has given me these fainting fits. I have controlled my loathing too long. One day, if only fate is kind, I shall fall down and be killed."
She collapsed at the end of this tirade, and burst into a torrent of tears. There was no affectation about that flood. It was the expression of real anguish, of long-pent-up suffering, and Lord Henry knew what infinite good it would do.
"Come, come, Miss Delarayne!" he exclaimed, still fearing that the humiliation of the discovery, despite the relief it gave, would prove too much for her immensely proud nature. "I share your secret now. I am strong. You will feel my strength with you. You are no longer alone. You will not have any more of these fainting fits."
She still sobbed, and it was heartrending to Lord Henry to watch her. Unmoved as he was, as a rule, by women's tears, he felt that these, coming as they did from such a proud spirit, were almost like blood issuing from a wound.
"And now what will you think of me?" she said at last, lifting her head, and drying her eyes. "Now that you have heard how unwomanly I am, how wicked, how criminally wicked! Because, I suppose, morally speaking, to lie awake and scheme out one's sister's disfigurement is as bad as to accomplish it."