"I shall fight it," she said inexorably, "to the last penny."
He gazed at her now as if she were a stranger. It was incredible that this was the woman whose hand he had kissed but the moment before. He ventured one more defense.
"I shall not see her. Where is she--in New York?"
"At grandmother's. I left her there. I thought when we had had our little talk you would come over with me and see her, and invite her home."
"Peter," said Electra, with a quiet certainty, "you must be out of your mind."
There they stood in the arbor, their lovers' arbor, gazing at each other like strangers. Peter recovered first, not to an understanding of the situation, but to the need of breaking its tension.
"I fancied," he said, "you would be eager to know her."
His mind ached under the strain of taking her in. He felt dumbly her contrast to the facile, sympathetic natures he had been thrown with in his life abroad. When he had left her, Electra was, as she would have said, unformed; she had not crystallized into the clearness and the hardness of the integrity she worshiped. To him, when in thought he contrasted her with those other types who made for joy and not always for moral beauty, she was immeasurably exalted. In any given crisis where other women did well, he would not have questioned that Electra must have done better. Her austerity was a part of her virgin charm. But as he looked at her now, in her clear outlines, her incisive speech, the side of him that thrilled to beauty trembled with something like distaste or fear. She was like her own New England in its bleakness, without its summer warmth. He longed for atmosphere.
But she had asked her question again: "Is she a grisette?"
"She is the daughter of Markham MacLeod."
"Yes," said Peter, with some quiet pride in the assurance, "chief of the Brotherhood, the great Markham MacLeod."
"If that is true," she said, "I must call on her."
"True? I tell you it is true. Electra, what are you saying?"
But Electra was looking at him with those clear eyes where dwelt neither guile nor tolerance of the guile of others.
"Did she tell you so," she inquired, "or do you know it for a fact?"
He had himself well in hand now, because it had sprung into his wise artist brain that he must not break the beauty of their interview. It was fractured, but if they turned the hurt side away from the light, possibly no one would know, and the outer crystalline sheen of the thing would be deceptively the same.