"But as for the tales that people who hate her tell of
her, and will go on telling of her--"
"They are merely the harvest of what she has sown?"
"Naturally. Poor Kitty!"
Madeleine Alcot rested her thin cheek on a still frailer hand and looked
pensively out into the darkness of the cedars. Her tone was neither
patronizing nor unkind; rather, the shade of ironic tenderness which it
expressed suited the subject, and that curious intimacy which had of
late sprung up between herself and Darrell. She had begun, as we have
seen, by treating him
de haut en bas. He had repaid her with manner of
the same type; in this respect he was a match for any Archangel. Then
some accident--perhaps the publication by the man of a volume of essays
which expressed to perfection his acid and embittered talent--perhaps a
casual meeting at a northern country-house, where the lady had found the
man of letters her only resource amid a crowd of uncongenial
nonentities--had shown them their natural compatibility. Both were in a
secret revolt against circumstance and their own lives; but whereas the
reasons for the man's attitude--his jealousies, defeats, and
ambitions--were fairly well understood by the woman, he was almost as
much in the dark about her as when their friendship began.
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