“Nom de Dieu, Milady!” she swore in her teeth. “If you do turn over the problem—you aristocrats—it is pretty work, no doubt! Just putting the bits of a puzzle-ball together so long as the game pleases you, and leaving the puzzle in chaos when you are tired! Oh, ha! I know how fine ladies and fine gentlemen play at philanthropies! But I am a child of the People, mark you; and I only see how birth is an angel that gives such as you eternal sunlight and eternal summer, and how birth is a devil that drives down the millions into a pit of darkness, of crime, of ignorance, of misery, of suffering, where they are condemned before they have opened their eyes to existence, where they are sentenced before they have left their mothers' bosoms in infancy. You do not know what that darkness is. It is night—it is ice—it is hell!”
Venetia Corona sighed wearily as she heard; pain had been so far from her own life, and there was an intense eloquence in the low, deep words that seemed to thrill through the stillness.
“Nor do you know how many shadows checker that light which you envy! But I have said; it is useless for me to argue these questions with you. You commence with a hatred of a class; all justice is over wherever that element enters. If I were what you think, I should bid you leave my presence which you have entered so rudely. I do not desire to do that. I am sure that the heroine of Zaraila has something nobler in her than mere malignity against a person who can never have injured her; and I would endure her insolence for the sake of awakening her justice. A virtue, that was so great in her at noon, cannot be utterly dead at nightfall.”
Cigarette's fearless eyes drooped under the gaze of those bent so searchingly, yet so gently, upon her; but only for a moment. She raised them afresh with their old dauntless frankness.
“Dieu! you shall never say you wanted justice and truth from a French soldier, and failed to get them! I hate you, never mind why—I do, though you never harmed me. I came here for two reasons: one, because I wanted to look at you close—you are not like anything that I ever saw; the other, because I wanted to wound you, to hurt you, to outrage you, if I could find a way how. And you will not let me do it. I do not know what it is in you.”
In all her courted life, the great lady had had no truer homage than lay in that irate, reluctant wonder of this fiery foe.
She smiled slightly.
“My poor child, it is rather something in yourself—a native nobility that will not allow you to be as unjust and as insolent as your soul desires—”
Cigarette gave a movement of intolerable impatience.
“Pardieu! Do not pity me, or I shall give you a taste of my 'insolence' in earnest! You may be a sovereign grand dame everywhere else, but you can carry no terror with you for me, I promise you!”