Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back and the end of the sofa. Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines. In her symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair and the soul that sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a tragic symbol for the poet who sang what he sometimes thought of wine and death and roses.
“I would go farther,” she said, and looked as if some other thing charged with sweetness had come before her.
“And even if one gained, one would never trust one's success,” Alicia faltered.
“Ah, if one gained one would hold,” Hilda said; and while she smiled on her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came upon her lips. Her thought turned inward absently; it embraced with sweet irony, a picture of poverty, chastity, obedience. As if she knew her betrayal already complete, “I wish I had such a chance,” she said.
“You wish you had such a chance!”
“I didn't mean to tell you—you have enough to do to work out your own problem; but—”
She seemed to find a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a miser might keep back gold. She let her secret escape through her eyes instead. She was deliberately radiant and silent. Alicia looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the Promised Land.
“Then after all he has prevailed,” she said.
“Who?”
“Hamilton Bradley.”