Intimately as we had known Liosha, this was the first time she had ever expressed an opinion regarding Adrian.  We had assumed that, having touched her life so lightly, he had been but a shadowy figure in her mind, and that, save in so far as his death concerned us, she had viewed him with entire indifference.  But her keen feminine brain had picked out the fatal flaw in poor Adrian’s character, the shallow glitter that made us laugh and the want of vision from which he died.

“Go on,” said Liosha.

I continued.  In justice to Doria, I elaborated her reasons for setting Adrian on his towering pinnacle.  Liosha nodded.  She understood.  False gods, whatever degree of godhead they usurped, had for a time the mystifying power of concealing their falsehood.  And during that time they were gods, real live dwellers on Olympus, flaming Joves to poor mortal Semeles.  Liosha quite understood.

I ended, more or less, a recapitulation of what she had heard, uncomprehending, in the car.

“And that’s how it stands,” said I.

I was rather shaken, I must confess, by my narrative, and I turned aside and lit another cigarette.  Liosha remained silent for a while, resting her cheek on her hand.  At last she said in her deep tones: 

“Poor little devil!  Good God!  Poor little devil!”

Tears flooded her eyes.

“By heavens,” I cried, “you’re a good creature.”

“I’m nothing of the sort,” said Liosha.  She rose.  “I guess I must have a clean up before lunch,” and she made for the door.

I looked at my watch.  “You just have time,” said I.

I opened the door for her to pass out, and fell a-musing in front of the fire.  Here was a new Liosha, as far apart from the serene young barbarian who had come to us two and a half years before blandly characterising Euphemia as a damn fool because she would not let her buy a stocked chicken incubator and take it to the Savoy Hotel, as a prairie wolf from the noble Great Dane.  Her nature had undergone remarkable developments.  As Jaffery had prophesied at Havre, she treated things in a big way, and she had learned restraint, not the restraint of convention, for not a convention would have stopped her from doing what she chose, but the restraint of self-discipline.  And she had learned pity.  A year ago she would not have wept over Doria, whom she had every woman’s reason for hating.  A new, generous tenderness had blossomed in her heart.  If all the cutthroats of Albania who had murdered her family had been brought bound and set on their knees with bared necks before her and she had been presented with a sharp sword, I doubt whether she would have cut off one single head.

A tap at the window aroused me.  It was Jaffery in the rain, which had just begun to fail, seeking admittance.  I let him in.

“This is an awful business, old man,” he said gloomily.

From which I gather that for once Barbara’s soothing had been of little avail.