A., and this striking endowment might just as well have tarried a
generation and a half longer.
She was by no means avid of publicity--people seldom are until they have
tasted of it--but she would have enjoyed a rapid and brilliant development
of her mental faculties with productiveness of some sort either as a sequel
or an interim. It was impossible to advance much farther in her present
circumstances.
No, she was far from perfect, and willing to admit it; but she had always
assumed that courage, moral as well as physical, was an accompaniment of
race, like breeding and certain automatic impulses. But her hands were
trembling and her cheeks drained of every drop of color because she must
have a plain and serious talk with a guilty wretch. She had nothing to
fear, but she could not have felt worse if she had been the culprit
herself. What was human nature but a bundle of paradoxes?
At least she had the respite of the dinner hour. Only a fiend would spoil
a man's dinner--and cigar--no matter what he had done. That would make the
full time of her own respite about an hour and twenty minutes.
In a moment of panic she contemplated telephoning to Aileen and begging
her to come over to dinner. She also no doubt could get Bascom Luning and
Jimmie Thorne. Then it would not be possible to speak to Mortimer before
to-morrow as he always fell asleep at ten o'clock when there was no
dancing.
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