Do you want me to vivisect my soul? You
yourself, can you talk about what most possesses you?"
"Oh," protested Alicia, "I wasn't thinking about myself," and at the
same moment the door opened and Hilda said, "Ah, Mr. Lindsay!"
There was a hint of the unexpected in Duff's response to Miss Howe's
greeting, and a suggestion in the way he sat down that this made a
difference, and that it would be necessary to find other things to say.
He found them with facility, while Hilda decided that she would finish
her tea before she went. Alicia, busy with the urn, seemed satisfied to
abandon them to each other, to take a decorative place in the
conversation, interrupting it with brief inquiries about cream and
sugar. Alicia waited; it was her way; she sank almost palpably into the
tapestries until some reviving circumstance should bring her out again,
a process which was quite compatible with her little laughs and
comments. She waited, offering repose, and unconscious even of that. You
know Hilda Howe as a creature of bold reflections. Looking at Alicia
Livingstone behind the tea-pot, the conviction visited her that a sex
three-quarters of this fibre explained the monastic clergy.
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