“Dear thing!  I didn’t indeed.  If I meant anything it was that I’m overstrung.  I’ve been horribly harried lately.”  She possessed herself of one of Alicia’s hands and stroked it.  Alicia kept her head bent for a moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment, upon the other woman’s shoulder.  Her defences crumbled so utterly that Hilda felt guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery.  They sat together for a moment or two in silence with only that supervening sense of successful aggression between them, and the humiliation was Hilda’s.  Presently it grew heavy, embarrassing.  Alicia got up and began a slow, restless pacing up and down before the alcove they sat in.  Hilda watched her—­it was a rhythmic progress—­and when she came near with a sound of brushing silk and a faint fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a long breath as if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, in a manner obtained, assimilated.

“Oh yes,” Miss Livingstone said, rehabilitating herself with a smile, “I must keep you.  I’ll do anything you like to make myself more—­worth while.  I’ll read for the pure idea.  I think I’ll take up modelling.  There’s rather a good man here just now.”

“Yes,” Hilda assented.  “Read for the pure idea—­take up modelling.  It is most expedient, especially if you marry.  Women who like those things sometimes have geniuses for sons.  But for me, so far as I count—­oh, my dear, do nothing more.  You are already an achieved effect—­a consummation of the exquisite in every way.  Generations have been chosen among for you; your person holds the inheritance of all that is gracious and tender and discriminating in a hundred years.  You are as rare as I am, and if there is anything you would take from me, I would make more than one exchange for the mere niceness of your fibre—­the feeling you have for fine shades of morality and taste—­all that makes you a lady, my dear.”

“Such niminy piminy things,” said Alicia, contradicting the light of satisfaction in her eyes.  The sound of a step came from the room overhead, and the light died out.  “And what good do they do me?” she cried in soft misery.  “What good do they do me!”

“Considerably less than they ought.  Why aren’t you up there now?  What simple, honester opportunity do you want than a sick-room in your own house?”

Alicia, with a frightened glance at the ceiling, flew to her side.  “Oh, hush!” she cried.  “Go on!”

“It ought to be there beside him, the charm of you.  The room should be full of cool refreshing hints of what you are.  Your profile should come between him and the twilight with a scent of violets.”

“It sounds like a plot,” Alicia murmured.

“It is a plot.  Why quibble about it?  If you smile at him it’s a plot.  If you put a rose in your hair it’s a deep-laid scheme, deeper than you perceive—­the scheme the universe is built on.  We wouldn’t have lent ourselves to the arrangement, we women, if we had been consulted; we’re naturally too scrupulous, but nobody asked us.  ‘Without our aid He did us make,’ you know.”