“Why not, my child?”
“You might be wantin’—wantin’ to fetch one of them here,” a spasm of jealousy contracting her brows.
He did not notice it, being still intent upon his coat tails. “Suppose I did bring one, Zilla—what would you do?”
“I’d dash vitriol at her,” said the child softly; “then she’d run away.”
He turned sharply to her with the sternest expression upon his face that she had ever seen there. Her words had conjured up a vision of his beloved Stargarde hiding her disfigured features from him, and Zilla gloating over her misery. “Your badness is awful,” he said backing away from her; “it is the badness of big cities. Thank Heaven, we don’t have it here.”
His words were as a spark to inflammable material. Immediately the child fell into a raging passion. Her joy in his affection for her had been so acute that it had almost amounted to pain, and her fury at his annoyance was so intense that she reveled in it with a mad sense of pleasure. She could not speak for wrath, but she returned his gaze with ten-fold interest, and walking deliberately up to the long mirror, she poised the dainty heel of her slipper and sent it crashing through the glass.
He neither spoke nor stirred, though some of the broken glass came falling about the toes of his patent leather shoes.
She caught her breath, flung at him a whole mouthful of her forbidden “swear words,” and sprang at a razor on his dressing table.
At this he started toward her quickly enough, and his hand closed over hers just as she seized the shining steel. She struggled with him like a small wild beast, but her strength was powerless against his. “Drop it! drop it!” he said commandingly; then more kindly, “Put it down, Zilla.”
At the change in his tone she looked up at him, and unclasping her fingers from the handle, allowed the dangerous instrument to slip to the floor.