O’Hara stared at him aghast. “Direct? Man, but you’re mad! The woman’s tortuous as a winding lane—and it’s a dark place it leads to, I’m thinking.”
De Nemours yielded once more to indulgent mirth, “Pauvre ami, those nerves of yours play tricks with you! Mrs. Lindsay is a woman with an exceptional mind of which she makes exceptional use. She is a beautiful woman, but alas, she does not remind you of it. She is entirely devoted to her work, she shows tact and courage, a rare discretion, a fine simplicity——”
“Oh, God!” There was something very like despair in O’Hara’s mirth. “Simplicity, by the Almighty! Because she wears blue serge instead of white lace? Why, I tell you that she trails yards of chiffon behind her when she goes, that her eyes are for ever smiling at you over a scented fan, that there’s always a rose in her hair and a kiss on her lips. She’s just as simple as Eve—and she still has fast hold of the apple!”
Celati eyed him a trifle sternly. “You object to women in politics, Mr. O’Hara?”
“Object? My soul, no! My mother and sister are in it up to their eyebrows, and making a rattling good job of it, too. But when they play the game, they play it. They leave more trappings than their hats and cloaks downstairs; they let you forget that they are women, and remember that they are human beings.”
“I find masculine women—distasteful.”
“I never said that they were masculine,” O’Hara retorted sharply, “I said that they were first and foremost human beings. Any other attitude is fatal. I tell you that this woman cares nothing in the world for our game; she is playing her own. And she is playing with loaded dice.”
“And what game is she playing, pray?”
“The oldest game in the world,” said O’Hara. “Antony’s dark-eyed Egypt played it, and that slim witch, Mary Stuart, and the milliner’s exquisite minx, Du Barry. Only they played behind silken curtains, with little jewelled hands and heads and words. They fight with other weapons nowadays, but the stakes haven’t changed since Antony lost a world and won a kiss.”
“And the stakes?”