"True," says her friend, with sudden gravity, "yet for all that I have felt a pang of envy sometimes when I have seen a poor beggar-woman in the streets press her child to her breast, and look with real love at its poor, pale, wizened face."
"What a confession for a disciple of Culture—one who has educated her eyes and taste to such perfection that a criante bit of furniture, a false tone of colour, a mistaken arrangement of draperies, will torture her as a discordant note tortures the ear of a musician! So you haven't outlived feminine weakness yet, my dear?"
"I suppose Nature always exacts her rights from us at some period or another," answers Lady Etwynde. "I have become accustomed to hear I am passionless and cold, and find it less trouble to live up to the character than to deny it. People are always so sure they know us better than we know ourselves. Being a single woman, it is rather a comfort to have such a reputation, and as I dislike men, and patronize fools, I am safe."
"But you are not cold-hearted at all," says Lauraine, turning her face, with its beautiful sea-kissed bloom, to that lovely languid one of her æsthetic friend. "Don't you really care to marry?"
"What should I gain?" asks Lady Etwynde, tranquilly. "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, you know. I am very well off. I can do pretty much—not exactly—as I please. I have no one to control me, or consult. I can follow my own whims and vagaries. Am I not well enough?"
"And yet you envied the beggar-woman?"
"That was in one of those moments when Nature was whispering at my heart. Nothing touches me like a child's sorrow or love. I have often longed to adopt one, but—well, I suppose the feeling would not be there?"
"You might marry for—love," suggests Lauraine.
"My dear," murmurs her friend, with delicate scorn and faint reproach, "at thirty years of age?"
"That is not old for a beautiful woman," says Lauraine, with unconscious but most sincere flattery. "And it is our natures that make us old, I think, more than actual years."