“Nobody wants to die, Honora!” pleaded the other.  “You wouldn’t yourself, when it came to it.”

A child might have spoken so.  The puerility of the words caused Honora to check her speech.  She looked with a merciless scrutiny at that face in which the dimples would come and go even at such a moment as this.  The long lashes curled on the cheeks with unconscious coquetry; the eyes, that had looked on horrors, held an intrinsic brilliance.  The Earth itself, with its perpetual renewals, was not more essentially expectant than this woman.

Honora’s amazement at her cousin’s hedonism gave way to contempt for it.

“Oh,” she groaned, “to have had the power to destroy a great man and to have no knowledge of what you’ve done!  To have lived through all that you have, and to have got no soul, after all!”

She had stepped back as if to measure the luscious opulence of Mary’s form with an eye of passionate depreciation.

“Stop her, Miss Barrington,” cried Mary, seizing Kate’s arm.  “There’s no use in all this, and people will overhear.  Can’t you take her away?”

She might have gazed at the Medusa’s head as she gazed at Honora’s.

“Come,” said Kate to Honora.  “As Miss Morrison says, there’s no use in all this.”

“If David and I did wrong, it was quite as much Honora’s fault as mine, really it was,” urged “Blue-eyed Mary,” her childish voice choking.

Kate shook her hand off and looked at her from a height.

“Don’t dare to discuss that,” she warned.  “Don’t dare!”

She threw her arm around Honora.

“Do come,” she pleaded.  “All this will make you worse again.”

“I don’t wish you ill,” continued Honora, seeming not to hear and still addressing herself to Mary.  “I know you will live on in luxury somehow or other, and that good men will fetch and carry for you.  You exude an essence which they can no more resist than a bee can honey.  I don’t blame you.  That’s what you were born for.  But don’t think that makes a woman of you.  You never can be a woman!  Women have souls; they suffer; they love and work and forget themselves; they know how to go down to the gates of death.  You don’t know how to do any of those things, now, do you?”

She had grown terrible, and her questions had the effect of being spoken by some daemonic thing within her—­something that made of her mouth a medium as the priestesses did of the mouths of the ancient oracles.

“Miss Barrington,” shuddered Mary, “I’m trying to hold on to myself, but I don’t think I can do it much longer.  Something is hammering at my throat.  I feel as if I were being strangled—­” she was choking in the grasp of hysteria.

Kate drew Honora away with a determined violence.

“She’ll be screaming horribly in a minute,” she said.  “You don’t want to hear that, do you?”

Honora gave one last look at the miserable girl.