“Avenge her,” said Hadria with set lips.
“Easier said than done, my dear!”
Gossip asserted that the father of the child was a man of some standing, the bolder spirits even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this was conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously listened to it.
Mrs. Walker was particularly scandalized with Mrs. Temperley’s ill-advised charity. Hadria had the habit of regarding the clergyman’s wife as another of society’s victims. She placed side by side the schoolmistress in her sorrow and disgrace, and the careworn woman at the Vicarage, with her eleven children, and her shrivelled nature, poor and dead as an autumn leaf that shivers before the wind. They had both suffered—so Mrs. Temperley dared to assert—in the same cause. They were both victims of the same creed. It was a terrible cultus, a savage idol that had devoured them both, as cruel and insatiable as the brazen god of old, with his internal fires, which the faithful fed devoutly, with shrinking girls and screaming children.
“I still fail to understand why you adopt this child,” said Valeria. “My Caterina would never have done it.”
“The little creature interests me,” said Hadria. “It is a tiny field for the exercise of the creative forces. Every one has some form of active amusement. Some like golf, others flirtation. I prefer this sort of diversion.”
“But you have your own children to interest you, surely far more than this one.”
Hadria’s face grew set and defiant.
“They represent to me the insult of society—my own private and particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It is through them that I am to be subdued and humbled. Just once in a way, however, the thing does not quite ‘come off.’”
“What has set you on edge so, I wonder.”