"A thunderstorm expresses her!" I laughed. "I thought of that myself. She's sullen—brooding, dark as a cloud. Yet the tiniest thing! One could almost break her in two."
"I held out my hand for good-night," Brian said. "She had to give hers, though I'm sure for some reason she didn't want to. It was small and—crushable, like a child's; and hot, as if she had fever."
"She didn't want to take yours, because we're North of Ireland and she's a fierce Sinn Feiner," I explained. Luckily Brian did not ask how I'd picked up this piece of information! He was delighted with it, and chuckled. "So she's a Sinn Feiner! She's very pretty, isn't she?"
"In a cross-patch way. She looks ready to bite at a touch."
"Poor child! Life must have gone hard with her. She's probably got a grouch, as the American boys over here say. We must try and do something to soften her down, and make her see things through rosier spectacles, if she and her brother join on to our party for a while."
"Ye-es."
"You don't like her, Molly?"
"Oh, I've hardly thought of her, dear. But you seem to have made up for that."
"Thunderstorms make you think about them. They electrify the atmosphere. I see this girl so distinctly somehow: little, white thing; big, gloomy eyes like storms in deep woods, and thin eyelids—you know, that transparent, flower-petal kind, where you fancy you see the iris looking through, like spirit eyes, always awake while the body's eyes sleep; and—and lots of dark hair without much colour—hair like smoke. I see her a suppressed volcano—but not extinct."
"The day may come when we'll wish she were extinct. But really you've described her better than I could, though I stared quite a lot last night. Come along, dear. It's six minutes to nine. Let's trot down to breakfast."