“Do you think he really loves you?” said Miss Glover, at last. “It seems to me that if he had, he would not have been so ready to give you up.”
Miss Ley smiled; it was certainly curious that a creature of quite angelic goodness should make so Machiavellian a suggestion.
“He offered to give me up because he loved me,” said Bertha, proudly. “I adore him ten thousand times more for the suggestion.”
“I have no patience with you,” cried the doctor, unable to contain himself. “He’s marrying you for your money.”
Bertha gave a little laugh. She was standing by the fire and turned to the glass.... She looked at her hands, resting on the edge of the chimney-piece, small and exquisitely modelled, the fingers tapering, the nails of the softest pink. They were the gentlest hands in the world, made for caresses; and, conscious of their beauty, she wore no rings. With them Bertha was well satisfied. Then, raising her glance, she saw herself in the mirror: for a while she gazed into her dark eyes, flashing sometimes and at others conveying the burning messages of love. She looked at her ears—small, and pink like a shell; they made one feel that no materials were so grateful to the artist’s hands as the materials which make up the body of man. Her hair was dark too, so abundant that she scarcely knew how to wear it, curling; one wanted to pass one’s hands through it, imagining that its touch must be delightful. She put her fingers to one side, to arrange a stray lock: they might say what they liked, she thought, but her hair was good. Bertha wondered why she was so dark; her olive skin suggested, indeed, the south with its burning passion: she had the complexion of the fair women in Umbria, clear and soft beyond description. A painter once had said that her skin had in it all the colour of the setting sun, of the setting sun at its borders where the splendour mingles with the sky; it had an hundred mellow tints, cream and ivory, the palest yellow of the heart of roses and the faintest, the very faintest green, all flushed with radiant light. She looked at her full, red lips, almost passionately sensual. Bertha smiled at herself, and saw the even, glistening teeth; the scrutiny had made her blush, and the colour rendered still more exquisite the pallid, marvellous complexion. She turned slowly and faced the three persons looking at her.
“Do you think it impossible for a man to love me for myself? You are not flattering, dear doctor.”
Miss Ley thought Bertha certainly very bold thus to challenge the criticism of two women, both unmarried; but she silenced it. Miss Ley’s eyes went from the statuesque neck to the arms as finely formed, and to the figure.
“You’re looking your best, my dear,” she said, with a smile.
The doctor uttered an expression of annoyance: “Can you do nothing to hinder this madness, Miss Ley?”
“My dear Dr. Ramsay, I have trouble enough in arranging my own life; do not ask me to interfere with other people’s.”