"Then it's true? Somebody told me he admired you so much."
Corinna smiled blandly. "I hope he does. We are great friends." Would there always be women like that in the world, she asked herself—women whose horizon ended with the beginning of sex? It was a feminine type that seemed to her as archaic as some reptilian bird of the primeval forests. How long would it be, she wondered, before it would survive only in the dry bones of genealogical scandals? As she looked after Rose Stribling's bright green car, darting like some gigantic dragon-fly up the street, her lips quivered with scorn and disgust. "I wonder if she thought I believed her?" she said to herself in a whisper. "I wonder if she thought she could hurt me?"
The sunshine was in her eyes, and she was about to turn and go back into the shop, when she saw that Alice Rokeby was coming toward her with a slow dragging step, as if she were mentally and bodily tired. The lace-work of shadows fell over her like a veil; and high above her head the early buds of a tulip tree made a mosaic of green and yellow lotus cups against the Egyptian blue of the sky. Framed in the vivid colours of spring she had the look of a flower that has been blighted by frost.
"How ill, how very ill she looks," thought Corinna, with an impulse of sympathy. "I wish she would come in and rest. I wish she would let me help her."
For an instant the violet eyes, with their vague wistfulness, their mute appeal, looked straight into Corinna's; and in that instant an inscrutable expression quivered in Alice Rokeby's face, as if a wan light had flickered up and died down in an empty room.
"The heat is too much for you," said Corinna gently. "It is like summer."
"Yes, I have never known so early a spring. It has come and gone in a week."
"You look tired, and your furs are too heavy. Won't you come in and rest until my car comes?"
The other woman shook her head. She was still pretty, for hers was a face to which pallor lent the delicate sweetness of a white rose-leaf.
"It is only a block or two farther. I am going home," she answered in a low voice.