Dr. Steuer was of Dutch descent, and her gifts were not forensic, but the key-note of her character was an intense and passionate loyalty. She had spent some of the most impressionable years of her life in the German clinics, and she cherished a romantic affection for a country whose natural and historic beauties no man will deny. She had steadfastly refused to read the "other side," pinning her faith to all that was best in the country of her youthful dreams. In consequence, her discourse, while informing, was somewhat beside the point; and had it not been for the deep love borne her by almost every one present, there would have been a polite but firm demand to give place.
Mrs. Balfame was smiling encouragement when her musings took a sudden and arbitrary twist. Being a person who never acted on impulse, her decisions, after due processes of thought, were commonly irrevocable. The moment she had made up her mind to pass her husband on, she had committed herself to the act; and, even before Dr. Anna Steuer had claimed her superficial attention, had already erected the question, How?
Mrs. Balfame was a woman who rarely bungled anything, and murder, she well knew, was the last of all acts to bungle, did the perpetrator desire to enjoy the freedom of his act. Being refined to her marrow, she shrank from all forms of brutality, and rarely, if ever, read the details of crime in the newspapers. The sight of blood disgusted her, although it did not turn her faint. She kept a pistol in her bedroom; burglars, particularly of late, had entered a large number of houses in Brabant County; but nothing would have horrified her more than to empty its contents into the worst of criminals.
Mechanically she had run through the list of all the accepted forms of removing human impedimenta and rejected them, when Dr. Anna's scientific mind, playing along the surface of hers, shot in the arrow of suggestion that she belonged naturally to the type of woman that poisoned if forced to commit murder. It was bloodless, decent, and required no vulgar expenditure of energy.
But healthy people, suddenly dead, were excavated and the quarry submitted to chemical tests; it was then—smiling brilliantly at her ardent pro-German friend—that Mrs. Balfame recalled a rainy evening some two years since. She and Dr. Anna had sat over the fire in the old Steuer cottage, and the doctor, who before the war never had been interested in anything but her friends, her science, and suffrage, had discoursed upon certain untraceable poisons, had even risen and taken down a vial from a secret cupboard above the mantel. During the same conversation, which naturally drifted to crime, Dr. Anna had discoursed upon the idiocy of doctors who poisoned with morphia, strychnine, or prussic acid, when not only were these organic poisons known to all scientific members of the profession, but they could easily remove the barrier to their complete happiness with cholera, smallpox, or typhus germs, sealed within the noncommittal capsule.
Mrs. Balfame shuddered at the mere thought of any of these dreadful diseases, having no desire to witness human sufferings, or to run the risk of infection, but as she stared at Dr. Anna to-day, she made up her mind to procure that vial of furtive poison.
So sudden was this resolution and so grim its portent that it was accompanied by unusual physical phenomena: she brought her sound white teeth together and thrust out her strong chin; her eyes became fixed in a hard stare and the muscles of her face seemed to menace her soft white skin.
Alys Crumley, the young woman who had been sketching Mrs. Balfame instead of listening to the discussion, caught her breath and dropped her pencil. For the moment the pretty, ultra-refined, elegant leader of Elsinore society looked not like St. Cecelia but like Medea. Always determined, resolute, smilingly dominant, never before had she betrayed the secret possibilities of her nature.
Miss Crumley cast a glance of startled apprehension about her, but the debate was just finished, every one was commenting upon the splendid self-control of the high participants, and repeating the New Yorker's last phrase: that not civilisation but man was a failure. A moment later Mrs. Balfame advanced to the edge of the platform, and, with her inimitable graciousness, invited the members of the Club to come forward and meet the distinguished guest. Little Miss Alys Crumley, watching her, listening to her pleasant shallow voice, her amused quiet laugh, came to the conclusion that the fearsome expression she had seen on her model's face had been a mere effect of light.