“Such being the case,” continues Miss Prince, in a tone of modest pride at the about-to-be-related exploit, “there was only one course open to me, and as it was perfectly consonant with my views of life and ethics, I took it without reluctance. I offered myself to him.”
“As you did to General —— three months ago?”
The recalled action—recalled by the very white lips of the heroine’s one hearer—would put most people out of countenance, and even Miss Prince’s once more admirably white surface shows a pink stain.
“You speak as if you were convicting me of inconsistency—of infidelity to my ideal,” she says, with a little haste of wronged modesty. “And superficially it may appear to be so; but it is only in appearance; as you know it has always been my creed that whenever and wherever I met what I conceived to be the highest and noblest qualities of humanity embodied in one man, I ought to offer myself unreservedly to him. If I have failed, it is a failure more glorious than most successes.”
Lavinia has stopped her flower-cutting, and forgotten her misgivings as to the tell-tale tragedy of her own face; she looks sullenly and with what she knows to be a baseless rage of jealousy at her, the manner and accompaniments of whose declaration of love she is in dull torment trying to reconstruct, while memory adds its sting by recalling to her the high, cool apartness of virginal indignation which had been her own attitude of mind towards Féodorovna’s former achievement.
“Circumstances were against me,” pursues Féodorovna, presently, looking away in a sort of dreamy protest towards the horizon. “That unlucky illness! If I had had your opportunities, the opportunities which were wasted on you, he might have decided differently.”
It is lucky that Miss Prince is still upbraiding the skyline; for Lavinia gives a sudden wince at the allusion to that safely preoccupied heart of her own which has rendered her, as a matter of course, danger-proof. To defend herself against that passionate repudiation of her own immunity, which seems fighting its mad way to her lips, she frames a needless question.
“He refused you?”
Féodorovna bends the chastened elegance of her black-and-white toque in dignified acquiescence.