Her voice ripped on the high note like a rag on a nail, and she checked, panting. Her hand went up to her throat as the fumy air rasped it.
“Mine!” she cried again, coughing. There was wild-fire in her eyes as she challenged them.
The little space between her solitariness and their grouped attention was filled with fog and silence and lamp-light, woven as it were into a fifth element. It was like a pool to be crossed. And across it, in answer, a laugh rippled out.
I don’t know who it was that laughed. I did not recognize the voice. Sometimes, looking back, I think it was the laugh of their collective soul.
“Oh!” cried Anita, and stopped as if she had been awakened suddenly by a blow—as if the little wondering, wincing cry had been struck out of her by a blow on the face. She stood thus a moment, uncertain. Then she, too, laughed, nervously, apologetically.
“Lord, we’re a queer set of friends! How we love one another!”
“You’ve all of you been awfully good to me,” said the Baxter girl. But her gratitude was too general to be acceptable. Even I could have told her that.
“Oh, we do our best for you,” said Mr. Flood.
“Yes, and she’s thinking this minute what a nice little scene this would make for her new book—touched up, of course,” said the woman behind him.
“Art—selection—Jimmy Whistler——” Mr. Flood was one indistinct murmur.
“With herself her own heroine again, eh?” Miss Howe baited her.
“Better folk than you do it, child! Anita says so. Don’t they, Anita?”
“Oh,” said Anita heavily, “I wish Madala Grey were here. I wish she hadn’t died. If she were here she wouldn’t—you’d never—she wouldn’t let you laugh at me.”
Miss Howe looked at her intently. There was a quick little run of expression across her large handsome face, like a hand playing a scale. It showed, that easily moved, easily read face, surprise, interest, concern, and, in the end, the sentimental impulse of your kind fur-clad woman to the beggar on the curb. ‘Why! I believe she’s cold! I don’t like it! Give her tuppence, quick!’ She was out of her chair, overwhelming Anita, in one impetuous heave of drapery.
“You’re right, Nita! We’re pigs! Something’s wrong with us. ’Pologize. You know we don’t mean it.”
She was shrunk to such a small grey creature again. I thought to myself—‘Fire? It’s not even diamond-sparkle. She’s as dull as stone.’