She threw her arm around Honora.
"Do come," she pleaded. "All this will make you worse again."
"I don't wish you ill," continued Honora, seeming not to hear and still addressing herself to Mary. "I know you will live on in luxury somehow or other, and that good men will fetch and carry for you. You exude an essence which they can no more resist than a bee can honey. I don't blame you. That's what you were born for. But don't think that makes a woman of you. You never can be a woman! Women have souls; they suffer; they love and work and forget themselves; they know how to go down to the gates of death. You don't know how to do any of those things, now, do you?"
She had grown terrible, and her questions had the effect of being spoken by some daemonic thing within her--something that made of her mouth a medium as the priestesses did of the mouths of the ancient oracles.
"Miss Barrington," shuddered Mary, "I'm trying to hold on to myself, but I don't think I can do it much longer. Something is hammering at my throat. I feel as if I were being strangled--" she was choking in the grasp of hysteria.
Kate drew Honora away with a determined violence.
"She'll be screaming horribly in a minute," she said. "You don't want to hear that, do you?"
Honora gave one last look at the miserable girl.
"Of course, you know," she said, throwing into her words an intensity which burned like acid, "that he did not die for you, Mary. He died to save his soul alive. He died to find himself--and me. Just that much I have to have you know."
At that Kate forced her to go into the Pullman, and seated her by the window where the rising wind, bringing its tale of eternal solitude, eternal barrenness, could fan her cheek. A gentleman who had been pacing the platform alone approached Mary and seemed to offer her assistance with anxious solicitude. She drooped upon his arm, and as she passed beneath the window the odor of her perfumes stole to Honora's nostrils.