"Am I really beautiful, Mathilde?"
Mathilde raised her eyes and hands to heaven in a gesture that admitted no doubt. Mathilde, moreover, could read a certain kind of history if the print were large enough.
Honora looked in the glass again. Yes, she was beautiful. He had found her so, he had told her so. And here was the testimony of her own eyes. The bloom on the nectarines that came every morning from Mr. Chamberlin's greenhouse could not compare with the colour of her cheeks; her hair was like the dusk; her eyes like the blue pools among the rocks, and touched now by the sun; her neck and arms of the whiteness of sea-foam. It was meet that she should be thus for him and for the love he brought her.
She turned suddenly to the maid.
"Do you love me, Mathilde?" she asked.
Mathilde was not surprised. She was, on the contrary, profoundly touched.
"How can madame ask?" she cried impulsively, and seized Honora's hand.
How was it possible to be near madame, and not love her?
"And would you go—anywhere with me?"
The scene came back to her in the night watches. For the little maid had wept and vowed eternal fidelity.
It was not—until the first faint herald of the morning that Honora could bring herself to pronounce the fateful thing that stood between her and happiness, that threatened to mar the perfection of a heaven-born love —Divorce! And thus, having named it resolutely several times, the demon of salvation began gradually to assume a kindly aspect that at times became almost benign. In fact, this one was not a demon at all, but a liberator: the demon, she perceived, stalked behind him, and his name was Notoriety. It was he who would flay her for coquetting with the liberator.