It all came out so casually, on the side, with the things they discussed over their lace-making in the wide-windowed upper living-room.
Then it was Longacre (according to Cissy) who had kept Thair—extremely sensitive—at a distance: Longacre, charming, a dear—but, well—fond of being about married women. Cissy had had _her_ little experience with him, and of course (magnanimously) there must be others.
“But if you _knew_ this about him—and let me take _such_ a man into my house—when I have a young girl!”
But, oh, Cissy was horrified. No! not such an attitude to Julia! Never! The point was, Did Mrs. Budd want Julia to _marry_ such a man?
Cissy felt much satisfaction. Her intention was far from cruel. She merely wanted something very much, and was trying to get it. Gauging their feelings by her own, it never occurred to her that she had more than vexed and annoyed her hostess and her hostess’s daughter. And this she preferred to being vexed and annoyed herself.
But the circumstances, upon which she had laid such bold hands, burst from her grasp and rushed past her. Yet Cissy was not aware of their progress. It was Florence Essington who first felt their precipitation. She foreboded a crisis.
With the waning afternoon the veil of the rain lifted and showed the long hook of the coast edged with leaping breakers, and a hurly-burly of high clouds tearing across the sky. The sun went down with streamers of yellow through the breaking storm. But the voice of the ocean grew louder with the wilder wind, until by fall of night its pulse was in the very timbers of the house. Its tumult assailed the very doors.
The house-party met over the tea-cups with such a sense of excitement as they might have felt aboard ship in a gale, an exhilaration that, by its feverishness, was the reaction from the depression of their immurement.
It was the last of the rain, Holden predicted; and the expectation of release dashed them all into high spirits.
Julia was gorgeous. If she had not been so beautiful she might have seemed overdone. She was alluring; she laughed and murmured to Thair until he was overwhelmed by the beauty of it. If he looked at her with all the admiration he gave to Gainsborough’s lovely, pictured ladies—and coveted her to frame and hang in his gallery—there was no reason Mrs. Budd should not imagine he coveted her to decorate the foot of his table. The memory of Cissy’s uncomfortable suggestions were confused with what seemed the near consummation of her hopes; but for the first time in forty-eight hours she beamed.