“You are very good,” Florence repeated, wonderingly.
“No; but I expect you are,” and Mrs. North showed two rows of little white teeth. “I should think you are a model of virtue,” she added, with an almost childlike air of frankness, which made it impossible to take offence at her words, though Florence felt that at best she was only regarded as the possessor of a quality that just before her visitor had denounced.
“Why,” she asked, smiling against her will, “do I look like a model of virtue?”
“Oh yes, you are almost Madonna-like,” Mrs. North said, with a sigh. “I wish I were like you, only—only I think I should get very tired of myself. I get tired now; till a reaction comes. But a reaction to the purely good must be tame at best.”
“You are very clever,” Florence said, almost without knowing it, and shrinking from her again.
“How do you know? My husband says I am clever, but I don’t think I am. I am alive. So many people are merely in the preface to being alive, and never get any farther. I am well in the middle of the book; and I am eager, so eager, that sometimes I long to eat up the whole world in order to know the taste of everything. Do you understand that?”
“No. I am content with my slice.”
“Ah, that is it. I am not content with mine. You have your husband and children.”
“But you have a husband.”
“Yes, I have a husband too; a funny old husband, a long way off, who is rapidly—too rapidly, I fear—coming nearer”—Florence hated her—“and no children. I amused myself with the old lady—Mrs. Baines—till she fled from me. Now I try other things. Good-bye.”