Part 29 (1/2)

”I didn't think it very strange--”

Cliffe watched her closely.

”--that a man should be--an inhuman beast--if he were jealous--and desperate. You can sympathize with these things?”

She drew a long breath, and threw away the cigarette she had been holding suspended in her small fingers.

”I don't know anything about them.”

”Because,” he hesitated, ”your own life has been so happy?”

She evaded him. ”Don't you think that jealousy will soon be as dead as--saying your prayers and going to church? I never meet anybody that cares enough--to be jealous.”

She spoke first with pa.s.sionate force, then with contempt, glancing across the room at Madeleine Alcot. Cliffe saw the look, and remembered that Mrs. Alcot's husband, a distinguished treasury official, had been for years the intimate friend of a very n.o.ble and beautiful woman, herself unhappily married. There was no scandal in the matter, though much talk. Mrs. Alcot meanwhile had her own affairs; her husband and she were apparently on friendly terms; only neither ever spoke of the other; and their relations remained a mystery.

Cliffe bent over to Kitty.

”And yet you said you could understand?--such things didn't seem strange to you.”

She gave a little, reckless laugh.

”Did I? It's like the people who think they could act or sing, if they only had the chance. I choose to think I could feel. And of course I couldn't. We've lost the power. All the old, horrible, splendid things are dead and done with.”

”The old pa.s.sions, you mean?”

”And the old poems! _You'll_ never write like that again.”

”G.o.d forbid!” said Cliffe, under his breath. Then as Kitty rose he followed her with his eyes. ”Lady Kitty, you've thrown me a challenge that you hardly understand. Some day I must answer it.”

”Don't answer it,” said Kitty, hastily.

”Yes, if I can drag the words out,” he said, sombrely. She met his look in a kind of fascination, excited by the memory of the story which had been told her, by her own audacity in speaking of it, by the presence of the dead pa.s.sion she divined lying shrouded and ghastly in the mind of the man beside her. Even the ugly things of which he was accused did but add to the interest of his personality for a nature like hers, greedy of experience, and discontented with the real.

While he on his side was nattered and astonished by her att.i.tude towards him, as Ashe's wife, she would surely dislike and try to trample on him.

That was what he had expected.

”I hear you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty,” said the Dean, who, having obstinately outstayed all the other guests, had now settled his small person and his thin legs into a chair beside his hostess with a view to five agreeable minutes. He was the most harmless of social epicures, was the Dean, and he felt that Lady Kitty had defrauded him at lunch in favor of that great, ruffling, Byronic fellow Cliffe, who ought to have better taste than to come lunching with the Ashes.

”Am I?” said Kitty, who had thrown herself into the corner of a sofa, and sat curled up there in an att.i.tude which the Dean thought charming, though it would not, he was aware, ”have become Mrs. Winston.

”Well, you know best,” said the Dean. ”But, at any rate, be good and explain to me what is an Archangel.”

”Somebody whom most men and all women dislike,” said Kitty, promptly.

”Yet they seem to be numerous,” remarked the Dean.

”Not at all!” cried Kitty, with an air of offence; ”not at all! If they were numerous they would, of course, be popular.”