Josephine was paler than Amber had ever seen her, and she was certainly colder than she had ever known her. She scarcely made any response to Amber’s long kiss.
Resignation—that was the word which came to Amber’s mind when she held her friend by both hands and looked at her. She was a statue—a marble statue of Resignation. The worst might come; it would not move her.
“I thought—I expected—” Amber began, with a tone of reproach in her voice. “You are really going to marry him—him—Mr. Clifton?” she cried, after faltering over a word or two.
“Did you not see it in the papers, and has any one the hardihood to put the papers in the wrong?” said Josephine.
“And you are to be congratulated? I am to congratulate you?” said Amber.
“Ah, that is quite another matter, my Amber,” laughed Josephine. Amber did not like her laugh.
“Why should it be another matter?” she asked. “If you love——”
“Heavens! are you—you—you who are the exponent of the ineffable fragrance of friendship—according to Plato—are you going to talk of the lustre of love?” said Josephine. “There’s a cluster of phrases for you, my dear. ‘The fragrance of Friendship—the lustre of Love’—quite like a modern poet’s phrase, is it not? Send it to your friend Mr. Richmond to serve up to his fourth form pupils. ‘Given, the phrase to make the poem’—that’s the exercise—what does he call it—the Time Study? Do let us try it. It should run like this: ‘The Fragrance of Friendship is folly’—that’s a capital line—even though it does contain a memory of ‘Dolores.’ And then you must go on—‘The Lustre of Love is a lure’? Yes, that might do, if you can’t find anything better. And now let us talk about something agreeable for a change. Here is my dear mother dying to tell you what she thinks of your trying to entrap poor Lord Lully in your network of Platonism. She saw you in the garden at Hyde Park Gate on Monday.”
Amber turned away. She had never known anything more pathetic than the way in which Josephine had rushed along when once she began to speak.
There was not a note of Josephine’s voice in all she had said. When Josephine had ever played at being cynical, she had gone softly—there had been something of merriment in her voice; but now there was the gleam of chilled steel in every flash of her phrases. The implacable brilliance of a bayonet charge was in all her words. Amber felt as if a bird which had always sung the song of a thrush had suddenly developed the metallic shriek of the parrot.