She snapped her fingers and tossed aside her cigarette: “You and I happen to be, locally, in the minority with our opinions, that’s all.”
Palla rose and walked slowly to the door. “Have you seen Jim recently?” she managed to say carelessly.
Marya waited for her to turn before replying: “Haven’t you seen him?” she asked with the leisurely malice of certainty.
“No, not for a long while,” replied Palla, facing with a painful flush this miserable crisis to which her candour had finally committed her. “We had a little difference.... Have you seen him lately?”
Marya’s sympathy flickered swift as a dagger:
“What a shame for him to behave so childishly!” she cried. “I shall scold him soundly. He’s like an infant––that boy––the way he sulks if you deny him anything––” She checked herself, laughed in a confused way which confessed and defied.
Palla’s fixed smile was still stamped on her rigid lips as she made her adieux. Then she went out with death in her heart.
At the Red Cross his mother exchanged a few words with her at intervals, as usual, during the séance.
The conversation drifted toward the subject of religious orders in Russia, and Mrs. Shotwell asked her how it was that she came to begin a novitiate in a country where Catholic orders had, she understood, been forbidden 313 permission to establish themselves in the realm of the Greek church.