She's a lily, and she draws the kind of beauty that
lilies have from her personal chastity and her religious enthusiasm.
Touch those things and bruise them, as--as marriage would touch and
bruise them--and she would be a mere fragment of stale vegetation. You
want him to clasp that to his bosom for the rest of his life?"
"I won't believe you. You're coarse and you're cruel."
Tears flashed into Miss Livingstone's eyes with this. Hilda, still
regarding the ceiling, was aware of them, and turned an impatient
shoulder while they should be brushed undetected away.
"I'm sorry, dear," she said. "I forgot. You are usually so intelligent,
one can be coarse and cruel with comfort, talking to you. Go into the
bath-room and get my salts--they're on the washhand-stand--will you? I'm
quite faint with all I'm about to undergo."
Laura Filbert came in as Alicia emerged with the salts. Ignoring the
third person with the bottle, she went directly to the bedside and laid
her hand on Hilda's head.
"Oh, Miss Howe, I am so sorry you are sick--so sorry," she said. It was
a cooing of professional concern, true to an ideal, to a necessity.
"I am not very bad," Hilda improvised.
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