"Why, Mademoiselle?"
"To kiss the hand of one so brave, Monsieur!"
He regarded her in silence. She went on almost with hardihood, throwing back her head, and looking at him with eyes that gleamed between their narrowed lids.
"See you well—if I were only beautiful, I would give my beauty to the man who saved France!"
Her hearer's heart began to pound violently, and a dimness like mist came before his sight. Through it he was aware of long eyes that gleamed like wonderful azure jewels, and a small red mouth that pleaded for the soul of P. C. Breagh.... He saw that the underlip was like the bud of a pomegranate, and that the curve of the upper disclosed teeth as white as curd.... Then he heard the silver voice say with a sigh in it:
"But I am not beautiful ... not even pretty. Ah, Monsieur, if I but were!..."
She was hating herself as she saw his look respond to hers. As the amber sparks in his gray eyes leaped into fire and his under jaw thrust out savagely, she thought:
"There is something of my mother in me—more than a little! How dared I scorn her—I, who can speak and look like this?" And she repeated with a plaintive, lingering inflection: "If I were ... if I but were!"
For the primal Eve is in all women, believe me. When the first Woman bowed herself in her apron of leaves to strike out between the lump of iron ore and the flint flake, the spark that, blown within its nest of dried moss, begat Fire, she laughed and then wept; for she remembered how she had learned of old from the Serpent, wise Teacher of guile and evil! to kindle the hot spark of Desire in the hearts of men.
This knowledge would have come to Juliette as a legacy from Eve, her earliest ancestress, even had she not been born of Adelaide.