"You were being so savage," said Queenie, with wide-open, wondering eyes. "What was happening?"
"Something stung me."
"Where?"
"Over the heart," Sylvia answered.
When they were back in their room Queenie returned to the subject of Sylvia's ill-temper.
"I could not be thinking it was you," she murmured. "I could not be thinking it."
"It was something that passed as quickly as it came," Sylvia said. "Forget about it, child."
"Were you angry because I was being too much with that boy? If you like, I shall say to him to-morrow that I cannot dance with him longer."
"Please, Queenie, forget about it. Somebody said something that made me angry, and I vented my anger on you. It was of no importance."
Queenie looked only half convinced, and when she was in bed she turned for consolation to the little chromolithographs that were always at hand. She had the custom of wearing a lace nightcap, and, sitting up thus in bed while her rapt gaze sought in those fairy landscapes the reflection of her own visions, she was remote and impersonal as a painted figure in some adoring angelic company. Sylvia felt that the moment was come to raise the question of the spiritual mood with which Queenie's outward appearance seemed in harmony, and that it was her duty to suggest a way of positively capturing and forever enshrining the half-revealed wonders of which these pictures spoke to her. Sylvia fancied that Queenie's development had now only reached as far as her own at about fifteen, and, looking back to herself at that age, she thought how much it might have meant to her if somebody could have given expression to her capacity for wonder then. Moreover, it was improbable that Queenie would grow much older mentally, and it was impossible for Queenie to reach her own present point of view by her own long process of rejecting every other point of view in turn. Queenie would never reject anything of her own accord, and it seemed urgent to fortify her with the simple and in some eyes childish externals of religion, which precisely, on account of such souls, have managed to endure.