"Yes, Mrs. Oldham, I quite agree with you. As you say: 'One can not be too careful.' Oh, no, I never was more interested in my life."
Ydo! Ydo! He took up the thread of his absorbing reflections again as Mrs. Oldham's voice purled on reciting with infinite detail all the data of one of her Helen‑like conquests. Ydo! What bond could exist between the reserved, even haughty Marcia in spite of all her gentleness, and the capricious, wayward, challenging Ydo? A bond sufficiently strong to permit the affectionate familiarity of first names? He had from the beginning believed that Ydo had some interest in the property, although he had never been able satisfactorily to guess the nature of it. But Marcia! The mere possibility of her being interested in what Ydo merrily called his Eldorado had never struck him before, and his brain was bewildered by the thousand new trains of conjecture it started.
At this point his reflections were broken in upon by the entrance of Marcia herself. She was all in white with the big, ruby‑eyed butterfly on her bosom, and the chain of butterflies about her throat. She looked more radiant than he had ever seen her as she stood before them drawing on her long gloves. Her eyes, no longer sad with all regret, were like deep blue stars, and her smile was full of a soft and girlish happiness.
"You look very well, Marcia," said her mother critically. "A new gown, of course. How differently they are cutting the skirts!"
"It's a lovely gown," affirmed Hayden, smiling down into Marcia's eyes. "After all, a simple white frock is the prettiest thing a woman can wear."
"Simple!" Mrs. Oldham's mirth was high and satiric. "Isn't that like a man? Simple is the last word to be applied to Marcia's frocks, Mr. Hayden. It's a good thing, as I often tell her, that her father left us so well provided for."
The lovely happiness vanished from Marcia's eyes. She looked quickly at her mother with an almost frightened expression, and then, with eyelashes lowered on her cheek, went silently on drawing on her gloves, two or three tense little lines showing about her mouth.
"I think Miss Oldham is very unkind," said Hayden, with some idea of bridging the situation gracefully, "never to have shown me any of her pictures. She paints, paints all day long, and yet will not give one a glimpse of the results. Kitty Hampton has been promising to show me some of the water‑colors she has, but she has not yet done so."
"Have you been talking much to Mr. Hayden of your pictures, Marcia?" asked her mother suavely.
The tone was pleasant, even casual, and yet, Hayden, sensitive, intuitive, had a quick, shocked sense of having blundered egregiously; and worse, he had a further sense of Mrs. Oldham's words being fraught with some ugly and hidden meaning. In her voice there had been manifest an unsuspected quality which had revealed her for the moment as not all frivolous fool or spoiled and empty‑headed doll; but a tyrant and oppressor, crueller and more menacing because infinitely weak and unstable.