“No, she did not talk to me. Perhaps that was her mistake. She might have reformed me. She never says more to me than civility demands. And it was not at tea. I accidentally dropped in on the Bethunes and found an Oriental had been lecturing there. Mrs. Muir was talking to him and I heard her. The man seemed to be a scholar and a deep thinker and as they talked a group of us stood and listened or asked questions.”
“How funny!” said Feather.
“It was not funny at all. It was astonishingly calm and serious—and logical. The logic was the new note. I had never thought of reason in that connection.”
“Reason has nothing to do with it. You must have faith. You must just believe what you’re told not think at all. Thinking is wickedness—unless you think what you hear preached.” Feather was even a trifle delicately smug as she rattled off her orthodoxy—but she laughed after she had done with it. “But it must have been funny—a Turk or a Hindoo in a turban and a thing like a tea gown and Mrs. Muir in her Edinburgh looking clothes talking about God.”
“You are quite out of it,” Coombe did not smile at all as he said it. “The Oriental was as physically beautiful as Donal Muir is. And Mrs. Muir—no other woman in the room compared with her. Perhaps people who think grow beautiful.”
Feather was not often alluring or coquettish in her manner to Coombe but she tilted her head prettily and looked down at her flower through lovely lashes.
“I don’t think,” she said. “And I am not so bad looking.”
“No,” he answered coldly. “You are not. At times you look like a young angel.”
“If Mrs. Muir is like that,” she said after a brief pause, “I should like to know what she thinks of me?”
“No, you would not—neither should I—if she thinks at all,” was his answer. “But you remember you said you did not mind that sort of thing.”