"Yes, Chris." She was sweet and obedient and alert.
"I know my conduct must seem to you perversely insulting,"—behind him the search-light wheeled while he gripped the sides of the window,—"but if I do not see Margaret Allington I shall die."
She raised her hands to her jewels, and pressed the cool globes of her pearls into her flesh. "She lives near here," she said easily. "I will send the car down for her to-morrow. You shall see as much of her as you like."
His arms fell to his sides.
"Thank you," he muttered; "you're all being so kind—" He disengaged himself into the darkness.
I was amazed at Kitty's beautiful act and more amazed to find that it had made her face ugly. Her eyes snapped as they met mine.
"That dowd!" she said, keeping her voice low, so that he might not hear it as he passed to and fro before the window. "That dowd!"
This sudden abandonment of beauty and amiability meant so much in our Kitty, whose law of life is grace, that I went over and kissed her.
"Dear, you're taking things all the wrong way," I said. "Chris is ill—"
"He's well enough to remember her all right," she replied unanswerably. Her silver shoe tapped the floor; she pinched her lips for some moments. "After all, I suppose I can sit down to it. Other women do. Teddy Rex keeps a Gaiety girl, and Mrs. Rex has to grin and bear it." She shrugged in answer to my silence. "What else is it, do you think? It means that Chris is a man like other men. But I did think that bad women were pretty. I suppose he's had so much to do with pretty ones that a plain one's a change."