“If anyone else had said that to me I should have laughed—you don't suspect the irony in it” Hilda said. “Pray who is to make it up to him?”
“I suppose there is that point of view.”
“I should think so, indeed! But taking it, I despair with you. I had her here the other day and tried to make the substance of her appear before him. I succeeded too—he gave me the most uncomfortable looks—but I might as well have let it alone. The great end of nature,” Hilda went on, putting down her cup, “reasonable beings in their normal state would never lend themselves to. So she invents these temporary insanities. And therein is nature cruel, for they might just as well be permanent. That's a platitude, I know,” she added, “but it's irresistibly suggested.”
Stephen looked with some fixedness at a point on the other side of the room. The platitude brought him, by some process of inversion, the vision of a drawing-room in Addison Gardens, occupied by his mother and sisters, engaged with whatever may be Kensington's substitutes at the moment for the spinet and the tambour frame; and he had a disturbed sense that they might characterise such a statement differently, if, indeed, they would consent to characterise it at all. He looked at the wall as if, being a solid and steadfast object, it might correct the qualm—it was really something like that—which the wide sweep of her cynicism brought him.
“From what he told me last week I thought we shouldn't see it. He seemed determined enough but depressed, and not hopeful. I fancied she was being upheld—I thought she would easily pull through. Indeed, I wasn't sure that there was any great temptation. Somebody must be helping him.”
“The devil, no doubt,” Hilda replied concisely; “and with equal certainty, Miss Alicia Livingstone.”
Arnold gave her a look of surprise. “Surely not my cousin!” he protested. “She can't understand.”
“Oh, I beg of you, don't speak to HER! I think she understands. I think she's only too tortuously intelligent.”
Stephen kept an instant of nervous silence. “May I ask?—” he began, formally.
“Oh yes! It is almost an indecent thing to say of anyone so exquisitely self-contained, but your cousin is very much in love with Mr. Lindsay herself. It seems almost a liberty, doesn't it, to tell you such a thing about a member of your family?” she went on, at Arnold's blush; “but you asked me, you know. And she is making it her ecstatic agony to bring this precious union about. I think she is taking a kindergarten method with the girl—having her there constantly and showing her little scented, luxurious bits of what she is so possessed to throw away. People in Alicia's condition have no sense of immorality.”