Peter's face was blazing, the indignant blood in it, the light darting from his eyes. He straightened. His hands clenched. His voice was thick with anger.
Electra had been regarding him in serene certainty of her own position and her ability to hold it. But human nature flashed out in her, the loyalty of blood.
"Are you speaking of my brother?" she demanded.
"I am speaking of your precious brother. And I might have known it." Ire, gathering in him, suffused his face anew. "I might have known Tom Fulton would do the dastardly trick in any given situation. Of course he never married her."
"You don't seem to think of her," she reminded him, under her breath.
"Not think of her! What else am I thinking of? Poor child! poor child!"
Electra was always having to feel alone in the world. Art left her desolate when other people sang and painted and she could only praise. Love and the fierce loyalty she coveted were always failing her and lavishing themselves elsewhere. She had one momentary impulse to speak for herself.
"Do you wonder now," she said, "that I wouldn't accept her."
"Not accept her, when she had been hurt? Good God, Electra! how monstrous it is. You, a delicate woman, fully believed he had wronged another woman as lovely as yourself, and yet the only impression it made on you was that you could not accept her."
Electra resisted the impulse to turn away or put her hands to her face; the tears were coming. She held herself rigid for a moment, choking down the shuddering of her nerves, lest her lips quiver and betray her.
"I suppose,"--the words were almost inaudible, yet he heard them,--"I suppose that is because you have lived so long in France."
"What, Electra?" He spoke absently, his mind with Rose.
"These things have ceased to mean anything to you. It is not a moral question. You see the woman is pretty and you--"
"No, no! She is beautiful, but that's not it. I can't theorize about it, Electra, only the whole thing seems to me monstrous. That he should wrong her! That he should be able to make her care about him in the first place--a fellow like him--just because he was handsome as the devil and had the tongue of angels--but that he should wrong her, that she should come over here expecting kindness--" It was Peter who put a hand before his eyes, not because there were tears there, but as if to shut her out from a knowledge of his too candid self. But in an instant he was looking at her again, not in anger, but sorrowfully.