"Dreadful!" she cried. "Mrs. Sheridan is a good, honest woman. She has given her life for her children, and she is the soul of good nature."
Sylvia laughed good-humouredly at this championship.
"A very excellent person, no doubt," she said, "but an ungovernable tongue. She never ceased talking while we were there. No wonder himself died peacefully. How he must have longed for death--and peace!"
"You don't understand----," Kathleen began.
"I don't profess to understand. I belong to another school to you. My set detests the prosaic and commonplace; we must have the clever and original. Platitudes are detestable to us, unless they come clothed in a brilliant metaphor. Homely virtues I neither pretend to understand or admire. I much prefer eccentricity, even clever vice."
Kathleen laughed tolerantly, recognising that further argument or expostulation was vain.
"Shall we try the lower bridge?" she asked.
"Of course we must. Denis Quirk is to meet us, and I wouldn't disappoint him for anything. Now, there is a man after my own heart, strikingly ugly, so ugly as to be beautiful, and wonderfully clever, sometimes so rude as to be quite original, full of a sardonic humour--an absolutely unique type. Denis Quirk is the sort of man I might condescend to love, and if ever I do love it will be like that river in flood down there."
The road ran high above a rocky gorge, through which the Grey was rushing in a turbulent torrent of water. It roared as it went, and leaped up angrily at the rocks on either side, foaming and bubbling, swirling into small whirlpools, as if in an impotent passion at the constraint.
Kathleen looked at the flood, and then at Sylvia's sleepy face and dreamy eyes.
"I wonder, too. Sometimes I scoff at the very thought of such a thing, and sometimes I believe that I could be as wild and turbulent as the river is to-day."
Beyond the gorge the river widens out into a broad estuary before it enters the sea. It is across this estuary that the lower bridge has been built. Just below it is the bar, where river and sea were battling in a wild confusion.
When Kathleen saw that the bridge was half submerged, and that the current was still strong, though not to be compared in violence with the maelstrom that poured through the gorge, she reined her horse in.