"I'm not prepared to tell you whether I like it or not," he said, while he sank into one of the big, yielding chairs. "But I consider it splendidly effective. It makes you appear so beautifully slippery. You look as if you could slide into an indiscretion, and then squirm right out again without being observed by anybody."
Mrs. Lee bit her lip. She had often let him say more saucy things than this to her, and not resented them. But to-night her mood held no such tolerance.
"You once promised me," she said, "that you would never speak rudely about my personal appearance." She seemed to shape with some difficulty this and the sentences that followed it. "I did not make myself. Perhaps if I had been granted that privilege I might have hit on a type more suited to your taste."
Goldwin shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, come," he said, "you've let me chaff you a hundred times before, and treated it as a joke."
He was still seated, while she stood. He forgot to think this a discourtesy toward her; he would have remembered it as such with almost any other woman; his outward manners were usually blameless; but perhaps he was no more at fault than she herself for the present negligence.
As it was, it did not strike her. She was thinking of other weightier things. A delicate table stood near her, and she half turned toward it, breaking from a massive basket of crimson roses one whose rich petals were heavy-folded and perfect, and fixing it in the bosom of her night-dark dress. Goldwin was watching her covertly but keenly all the while. She seemed to him like an incarnate tempest—he knew her so well. His furtive but sharp gaze saw the tremor in her slim, pale fingers as she dealt with the discompanioned rose.
Finding that she did not answer, he went on: "You're out of sorts to-night. Has anything gone wrong during the day?"
She tossed her head for an instant, and her lip curled so high that it showed the white edge of her teeth. But promptly she seemed to decide upon a mild and not a harsh retort. "I have been at the hospital most of the afternoon," she said. "I prayed for an hour beside a poor old woman who was dying with cancer." She gave a quick, nervous shudder. "It was horrible." She closed her eyes, then slowly unclosed them. "Horrible," she repeated, in her most measured way.
"It must have been simply ghastly," observed Goldwin, with dryness. "For Heaven's sake, why don't you swear off these debauches of charity for at least a month or two? They're completely breaking you up. It's they that put you in these frightful humors."
She came several steps toward him, and sank into a chair quite close at his side. She twisted herself so inordinately, in taking this new posture, that her detractors would have decided the whole performance one of her most aggravating affectations. "What frightful humors?" she asked. This question had the same loitering, somnolent intonation that always belonged to her speech, and contrasted so quaintly with her nervous, volatile turns and poses.