A child might have spoken so. The puerility of the words caused Honora to check her speech. She looked with a merciless scrutiny at that face in which the dimples would come and go even at such a moment as this. The long lashes curled on the cheeks with unconscious coquetry; the eyes, that had looked on horrors, held an intrinsic brilliance. The Earth itself, with its perpetual renewals, was not more essentially expectant than this woman.
Honora's amazement at her cousin's hedonism gave way to contempt for it.
"Oh," she groaned, "to have had the power to destroy a great man and to have no knowledge of what you've done! To have lived through all that you have, and to have got no soul, after all!"
She had stepped back as if to measure the luscious opulence of Mary's form with an eye of passionate depreciation.
"Stop her, Miss Barrington," cried Mary, seizing Kate's arm. "There's no use in all this, and people will overhear. Can't you take her away?"
She might have gazed at the Medusa's head as she gazed at Honora's.
"Come," said Kate to Honora. "As Miss Morrison says, there's no use in all this."
"If David and I did wrong, it was quite as much Honora's fault as mine, really it was," urged "Blue-eyed Mary," her childish voice choking.
Kate shook her hand off and looked at her from a height.
"Don't dare to discuss that," she warned. "Don't dare!"