"My dear Emmy," said Zora calmly, "men as possible lovers and men as staunch friends are two entirely different conceptions."
Emmy broke a piece of toast viciously.
"I think they're beasts," she exclaimed.
"Good heavens! Why?"
"Oh, I don't know. They are."
Then, after the quick, frightened glance of the woman who fears she has said too much, she broke into a careless half-laugh.
"They are such liars. Fawcett promised me a part in his new production and writes to-day to say I can't have it."
As Emmy's professional disappointments had been many, and as Zora in her heart of hearts did not entirely approve of her sister's musical-comedy career, she tempered her sympathy with philosophic reflections. She had never taken Emmy seriously. All her life long Emmy had been the kitten sister, with a kitten's pretty but unimportant likes, dislikes, habits, occupations, and aspirations. To regard her as being under the shadow of a woman's tragedy had never entered her head. The kitten playing Antigone, Ophelia, or such like distressed heroines, in awful, grim earnest is not a conception that readily occurs even to the most affectionate and imaginative of kitten owners. Zora accepted Emmy's explanation of her petulance with a spirit entirely unperturbed, and resumed the perusal of her letter. It was from the Callenders, who wrote from California. Zora must visit them on her way round the world.
She laid down the letter and stirred her tea absently, her mind full of snow-capped sierras, and clear blue air, and peach forests, and all the wonders of that wonderland. And Emmy stirred her tea, too, in an absent manner, but her mind was filled with the most terrible thoughts wherewith a woman's mind can be haunted.