"You talk as if business were a woman," he said, with a smile of conscious sex superiority, "and as if you were jealous."
Cicily concealed her resentment of the patronizing manner, and replied with no apparent diminution in her amiability:
"That's just it: I am jealous!"
"Good heavens!" Hamilton cried, indignantly. "Surely, you know that I never think twice of any woman I meet in business."
The wife smiled in high disdain.
"Woman!" she ejaculated, with scornful emphasis. "I'm not in the least afraid of any woman being more to you than I am, Charles. Just let one try!"
"Why, what would you do?" Hamilton inquired, curiously.
The answer was swift and vigorous, pregnant with the insolent consciousness of power that is the prerogative of a lovely woman. Cicily leaned forward in her chair, and the golden eyes darkened and flashed.
"Why, I'd beat her! I'd be everything to you that she was—and more. I'd outdress her, I'd out-talk her, I'd outwit her, I'd out-think her. I'd play on your love and on your masculine jealousy. Oh, there'd be plenty of men to play the play with me. I'd be more alluring, more fascinating, more difficult, until I held you safe again in the hollow of my hand, and then—why, then, I'd be very much tempted to throw you away!"
The verve with which this girl-woman thus vaunted her skill in the use of those charms that dominate the opposite sex thrilled and fascinated the lover, pierced the reserve that possession had overcast on ardor. His cheeks flushed, under the provocation of the glances with which she marked the allurements of which she was the mistress. As she finished speaking, he sprang up from his chair, caught her in his arms, and drew her passionately to his breast. But Cicily avoided the kiss he would have pressed on her lips. With her mouth at his ear, she whispered, plaintively now, no longer boastful, only a timid, fearing, jealous woman: