'Miss Lake is pleased to be ironical to-night,' he said, with a smile.
'Am I? I dare say. All women are. Irony is the weapon of cowardice, and cowardice the vice of weakness. Yet I think I was naturally bold and true. I hate cowardice and deception even in myself—I hate perfidy—I hate fraud.'
She tapped a little emphasis upon the floor with her white satin shoe, and her eyes flashed with a dark and angry meaning among the crowd at the other end of the room, as if for a second or two following an object to whom in some way the statement applied.
The strange bitterness of her tone, though it was low enough, and something wild, suffering, and revengeful in her look, though but momentary, and hardly definable, did not escape Lord Chelford, and he followed unconsciously the direction of her glance; but there was nothing there to guide him to a conclusion, and the good people who formed that polite and animated mob were in his eyes, one and all, quite below the level of tragedy, or even of melodrama.
'And yet, Miss Lake, we are all more or less cowards or deceivers—at least, to the extent of suppression. Who would speak the whole truth, or like to hear it?—not I, I know.'
'Nor I,' she said, quietly.
'And I do think, if people had no reserves, they would be very uninteresting,' he added.
She was looking, with a strange light upon her face—a smile, perhaps—upon the open pages of 'Moore's Melodies' as he spoke.
'I like a little puzzle and mystery—they surround our future and our past; and the present would be insipid, I think, without them. Now, I can't tell, Miss Lake, as you look on Tom Moore there, and I try to read your smile, whether you happen at this particular moment to adore or despise him.'
'Moore's is a daring morality—what do you think, for instance, of these lines?' she said, touching the verse with her bouquet.