Her tone was still vibrating and sarcastic.
"He's not much of a talker, our Nehemiah," said Hallin, smiling; "but he has the most extraordinary power as a speaker over a large popular audience that I have ever seen. The man's honesty is amazing,—it's his tempers and his jealousies get in his way. You astonished him; but, for the matter of that, you astonished Frank and me still more!"
And as he fell back into his chair, Marcella caught a flash of expression, a tone that somehow put her on her defence.
"I was not going to listen to such unjust stuff without a word. Politics is one thing—slanderous abuse is another!" she said, throwing back her head with a gesture which instantly brought back to Hallin the scene in the Mellor drawing-room, when she had denounced the game-laws and Wharton had scored his first point.
He was silent, feeling a certain inner exasperation with women and their ways.
"'She only did it to annoy,'" cried Frank Leven; "'because she knows it teases.' We know very well what she thinks of us. But where did you get it all from, Miss Boyce? I just wish you'd tell me. There's a horrid Radical in the House I'm always having rows with—and upon my word I didn't know there was half so much to be said for us!"
Marcella flushed.
"Never mind where I got it!" she said.
In reality, of course, it was from those Agricultural Reports she had worked through the year before under Wharton's teaching, with so much angry zest, and to such different purpose.
* * * * *