She let the pistol pass into Venetia’s grasp; and stood, irresolute and ashamed, her fluent tongue stricken dumb, her intent to wound, and sting, and outrage with every vile, coarse jest she knew, rendered impossible to execute.  The purity and the dignity of her opponent’s presence had their irresistible influence, an influence too strong for even her debonair and dangerous insolence.  She hated herself in that moment more than she hated her rival.

Venetia laid the loaded pistol down, away from both, and seated herself on the cushions from which she had risen.  Then she looked once more, long and quietly, at her unknown antagonist.

“Well?” she said, at length.  “Why do you venture to come here?  And why do you feel this malignity toward a stranger who never saw you until this morning?”

Under the challenge the fiery spirit of Cigarette rallied, though a rare and galling sense of intense inferiority, of intense mortification, was upon her; though she would almost have given the Cross which was on her breast that she had never come into this woman’s sight.

“Oh, ah!” she answered recklessly, with the red blood flushing her face again at the only evasion of truth of which the little desperado, with all her sins, had ever been guilty.  “I hate you, Milady, because of your Order—­because of your nation—­because of your fine, dainty ways—­because of your aristocrat’s insolence—­because you treat my soldiers like paupers—­because you are one of those who do no more to have the right to live than the purple butterfly that flies in the sun, and who oust the people out of their dues as the cuckoo kicks the poor birds that have reared it, out of the nest of down, to which it never has carried a twig or a moss!”

Her listener heard with a slight smile of amusement and of surprise that bitterly discomfited the speaker.  To Venetia Corona the girl-soldier seemed mad; but it was a madness that interested her, and she knew at a glance that this child of the army was of no common nature and no common mind.

“I do not wish to discuss democracy with you,” she answered, with a tone that sounded strangely tranquil to Cigarette after the scathing acrimony of her own.  “I should probably convince you as little as you would convince me; and I never waste words.  But I heard you to-day claim a certain virtue—­justice.  How do you reconcile with that your very hasty condemnation of a stranger of whose motives, actions, and modes of life it is impossible you can have any accurate knowledge?”

Cigarette once again was silenced; her face burned, her heart was hot with rage.  She had come prepared to upbraid and to outrage this patrician with every jibe and grossness camp usage could supply her with, and—­she stood dumb before her!  She could only feel an all-absorbing sense of being ridiculous, and contemptible, and puerile in her sight.

“You bring two charges against me,” said Venetia, when she had vainly awaited answer.  “That I treat your comrades like paupers, and that I rob the people—­my own people, I imagine you to mean—­of their dues.  In the first, how will you prove it?—­in the second, how can you know it?”